Definitions

Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge and free of other access barriers. The lack of barriers promotes the dissemination of the research results within the scientific community but also to the general public.

There are currently a few variants or types of OA:

• Golden OA: the publisher makes all articles and related content available for free immediately on the journal's website. The journal does not charge subscription fees from the readers.

• Green OA (also known as self-archiving): The publisher permits the author(s) to self-archive a nearly final version of the manuscript in an open repository. The near-final version of the manuscript refers usually to an accepted manuscript as returned by the journal to the author.

• Hybrid OA: subscription-based journals allow by means of a per-article publication charge making individual articles OA immediately upon publication. Articles not opened this way remain behind a paywall.

Embargo: a publisher may require a publication to remain initially behind a paywall and made open only after a predetermined time (the term embargo may refer to this process of postponing opening a publication or to the time of postponement). At the time of release of this policy, several major research funding agencies and research organisations are pushing towards immediate Open Access (i.e., Golden OA). In case of funding agencies, they are increasingly requiring that research results generated with their funding must be made fully OA immediately upon publication.

Form of policy

• FMI strives towards highest scientific standards in the institute’s scientific results and output – including the channels of publication.

• FMI supports and requires open access publishing resulted from publicly funded research as fundamental part of its mission to promote open science.

• The Green route is required while the Golden immediate access is strongly encouraged when possible. The hybrid OA is acceptable in exceptional circumstances and only if the external funding contract permits it. Non-OA publishing requires explicit approval by head of unit; however, it is preferable to be avoided.

Target content

• FMI policy of open access applies as a baseline to all scientific literature in which at least one author is affiliated with FMI and according to Research Literature Categorization.

• In publications with authors from multiple organisations, the publications and OA policies of the organisation the first author is affiliated with have precedence, if there are differences between the different organisations policies.

Gratis or libre

• FMI considers that it is vital and fair that the sources and creators (persons and organisations including funding sources) of original scientific output are appropriately credited and acknowledged for and retain appropriate rights to their creations.

• Regarding licensing, FMI recommends the libre route (all publications to be accompanied by a CC By 4.0 license to ensure citation). However, if the researcher desires so, the gratis (CC0 license) can also be used.

Repositories

• FMI uses the publication information registry and reporting service JUSTUS for publications descriptive metadata.

• FMI’s own publication series are Open Access (FMI publications series are either available in the HELDA repository or are open web journals) and for Green Open Access of peer reviewed scientific articles and other publications FMI will provide an institutional self-archiving repository service which is openly available to the public. The aim is to make this service available in 2021.

• If the authors find themselves under contractual obligation to deposit their scientific articles in a specific repository, then metadata for the articles and the link to the external repository are recommended to be added in JUSTUS.

Time of deposit and publisher embargo

• FMI requires that the scientific article should be deposited in the repository immediately when it is ready for publication.

• If an embargo period is required by the journal, this will be accommodated. It is highly recommended that the embargo time of the journal should not exceed 6 months.

• If a publisher’s policy requires an unreasonable long embargo or does not allow self-archiving the author is required to try to publish somewhere else.

• The authors must ensure that the article will be openly available at the end of the embargo period.

Evaluation

• FMI reviews/evaluates and reports the level, progress and impact of OA as a baseline continuously, but at minimum annually. Reporting is done both internally as well as to the relevant stakeholders.