FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot: Ninth Progress Report March 1st, 2017 This is the ninth progress report for the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot, 21 months after its effective launch on May 30 th, 2015. This means it s just two months left for the initiative to come to a close as of Apr 30 th, 2017. 1. Total of funded requests On March 1 st, 2017, the project has approved funding for 799 requests. This number includes 122 conditionally approved requests these are eligible submissions for which a correct invoice still needs to be provided by the applicant. For these requests, there is no official data about APC cost available, as there is no formal invoice available yet. For the purpose of this report, we will use the number of requests that have been approved, conditionally or not. Fig 1.- Number of approved funding requests as of March 1 st, 2017 Out of these 799 approved requests, 743 have been for research articles, and 43 have been for books and monographs. The remainder concern conference proceedings and book chapters. On March 1 st, 2017 and on a total of 677 approved requests (with invoice), the total amount spent on APCs within the scope of this pilot is 950,933 EUR, with an average of 1,623 EUR per publication. FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 9 th progress report (March 1 st, 2017) 1 of 9
Note that the median APC value is 1429.12 EUR. The below figure illustrates the distribution of APC height (note that the high amount of requests in the 2000-2099 and 6000-6099 categories are caused by the high number of submissions requesting the maximum allowed amount, respectively 2000 for research articles and 6000 for books). Fig 2- Distribution of (approved) requests per price range (ranges not shown have count 0 )- March 1 st, 2017 2. Funding request distribution and growth by country If we take a look at the distribution of requests per country and how much that number has grown over the last 12 months, we see that the same 5 countries remain on top of the list. Spain, UK, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands divide the lion s share of the requests amongst each other (462 or 58%), followed by a block of 7 countries with each between 20 and 40 requests or another 23% of the total. Take note that these numbers reflect the country of the institution where the submitter of the request is based. While the total number of FP7 projects in a country is definitely a factor of influence, a high number of requests can, in some cases, also reflect the excellent advocacy and support activities conducted by sometimes only a couple of institutions within a certain country (Spain and the Netherlands being two examples). FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 9 th progress report (March 1 st, 2017) 2 of 9
Fig 3- Funding request distribution and 12 month growth (since March 1 st, 2016) Country Approved March 1st, 2017 Approved March 1st, 2016 Spain 128 40 UK 120 40 Italy 88 25 Germany 86 20 Netherlands 60 13 France 40 15 Switzerland 32 16 Greece 26 9 Austria 23 5 Sweden 23 10 Belgium 21 7 Ireland 21 3 Finland 19 7 Denmark 15 2 Portugal 14 8 Hungary 13 4 Israel 9 7 Turkey 9 4 Norway 6 2 Poland 6 2 FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 9 th progress report (March 1 st, 2017) 3 of 9
Slovenia 4 2 Cyprus 3 0 Lithuania 3 0 Serbia 3 0 Russia 3 0 US 3 0 South Africa 3 1 Australia 2 2 Czech Republic 2 2 Croatia 2 1 Burkina Faso 1 1 Bulgaria 1 1 Iceland 1 0 Luxemburg 1 0 Mexico 1 0 Slovakia 1 0 Table 1.- Distribution of approved funding requests by [requestor s] country as of March 1 st, 2017, compared with approved funding requests as of March 1 st, 2016 FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 9 th progress report (March 1 st, 2017) 4 of 9
3.Publishers and journals Publisher N of funded requests NPG 132 BioMed Central 113 PLoS 86 Frontiers 72 Copernicus 67 MDPI 58 Wiley 22 Elsevier 21 OSA 18 Hindawi 15 River Publishers 15 BMJ 11 Springer 11 Institute of Physics 9 InTECH 9 Ubiquity Press 6 IEEE 6 Palgrave Macmillan 5 (NPG) Resilience Alliance 5 Am Soc Microbiol 5 OUP 5 SAGE 5 IoP 5 IOP Publishing 5 Table 2- Number of requests per publisher if more or equal to 5, as of March 1 st, 2017 FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 9 th progress report (March 1 st, 2017) 5 of 9
Journal Publisher Number of publications Scientific Reports NPG 89 PLoS ONE PLoS 68 Nature Communications NPG 40 Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Copernicus 23 Sensors MDPI 22 Optics Express OSA 17 Biogeosciences Discussions Copernicus 13 Frontiers in Plant Science Frontiers 12 Cell Reports Elsevier 11 Frontiers in Microbiology Frontiers 11 Environmental Research Letters IoP Publishing 10 Frontiers in Psychology Frontiers 9 BMC Genomics BMC 8 BMJ Open BMJ 8 BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making BMC 6 Energies MDPI 6 PLoS Computational Biology PLoS 6 BMC Bioinformatics BMC 5 Ecology and Society Resilience Alliance 5 New Journal of Physics IoP Publishing 5 PloS Genetics PLoS 5 Science Advances AAAS 5 Table 3- Funded publications per journal if equal to or more than 5 publications, as of March 1st, 2017 4. Eligible projects According to the project database (pulled from CORDA), a total of 8153 projects is potentially eligible for support. Remember that projects are only eligible when they have ended, but no more than 2 years ago. In total, there have been requests made on behalf of 597 projects. 50 of those have reached the limit of 3 publications per project and can therefore no longer apply through our submission system (the interface shows an automated rejection message when the limit is reached). 5. What s next? As the project is entering its final phase, we can make a projection of what we can expect in the next two months. If we maintain an average rate of 50 requests per month, allowing for an increase in the last month of the pilot (April) and adding the numbers to be provided by the publishers with whom we have a pre-payment agreement - we can assume that we will have processed between 900 and 1000 requests over the 22 month pilot length. These final numbers will be communicated in the 10 th (and last!) progress report, to be released in the first week of May. FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 9 th progress report (March 1 st, 2017) 6 of 9
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