Successful implementation of the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot in the Netherlands

A year and a half into its implementation, the EC post-grant funding initiative for FP7 projects run under the OpenAIRE2020 project has already funded over 630 Open Access journal articles, books and book chapters. As of mid-October, 41 of these have been granted to requests arrived from the Netherlands, which places the country in the fifth position in the classification of funded requests by country. Spain (95), the UK (86), Germany (72) and Italy (66) are featured in the first four places on this list (see slide 9 on the recent presentation of the project for the full classification).

The distribution by institution of these 41 approved requests in the Netherlands shows a wide range of funded organisations, from universities to SMEs through research centres and high schools. Most funding requests have actually arrived from University Medical Centres (Nijmegen, Leiden, Amsterdam, Rotterdam),  a direct result of the very relevant role that fully Open Access journals play in the biomedical sciences. Most of the over 150 fully Open Access journals funded so far by this initiative do in fact belong to this research area.

Radboud University/RUMC received the most funded requests (10), followed by Leiden University/LUMC (6), University of Amsterdam/AMC (3), NIOZ (3), Technical University Eindhoven (3) and the University of Utrecht (3).

Two main factors have resulted in a quick growth of the number of funded requests in the country in the last few months:

1. The most effective institution thus far, Radboud University Nijmegen/Radboudumc, has received an institutional block grant from the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot that allows it to run the funding initiative in a decentralized way, directly funding its authors from the Library.
2. The start of the pre-payment agreement implementation with publishers like BioMed Central and Copernicus has allowed to identify eligible manuscripts upon submission; many of these come from corresponding authors at Dutch institutions.

Biomed Central, with 10 funded journal articles, is in fact the top publisher in the distribution of funded publications by publisher for this set of 41 requests, followed by Frontiers (5), Nature Publishing Group (5), PLoS (4) and MDPI (3). Three of the 41 requests applied for funding for Open Access books, in line with a global distribution by document type for the whole initiative that shows a very strong prevalence of journal articles.

Despite the good results so far, funding requests are yet to be received from Dutch organisations involved in a large number of eligible FP7 projects such as TNO or Deltares. Specifically tailored dissemination strategies are being designed that will hopefully raise awareness of the funding opportunity also among these stakeholders.