FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot: Sixth Progress Report One Year into the Initiative This is the sixth progress report for the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot one year since its launch on May 30 th, 2015. The data for this report is however collected as of Jun 15 th, 2016 and not May 31 st. This is because mid-june marks an important date for the project, namely the start of the implementation of the pre-payment agreements that OpenAIRE has signed with big Open Access publishers like Copernicus and BioMed Central. These two agreements, plus the ones signed with Wiley and previously with Ubiquity Press, will have a significant impact on some of the stats that are regularly being collected for this series of progress reports, such as the distribution of approved funding requests by country and by publisher. The fact that discounts will be applied to the APC fees paid within these agreements may also have an impact on the average APC fees paid by the Pilot, so it made sense to delay the reporting date in order to release this sixth report when the new prepayment workflows are about to start running. Up-to-date figures for the Pilot implementation are permanently available as usual at the live reporting module in the OpenAIRE system, while this series of reports provide snapshots that can be compared with previous and future ones. Fig 1.- Number of approved funding requests as of Jun 1 st, 2016 In order to keep the distribution homogeneous, the most recent figure for approved funding requests on the histogram is provided as of May 31 st, when there were 398 of them. As of Jun 15 th, their number has already climbed to 421. The pre-payment agreements mentioned above are also expected to have an impact on the rate of growth of approved funding requests, which is expected to speed up. The ongoing dissemination actions for the initiative among institutions and researchers will ensure that the information on the much easier invoicing procedures reaches the latter. FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 6 th progress report (Jun 15 th, 2016) 1 of 6
A year into the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot: some results 1.1. Funding request analysis: document types 421 funding applications have been approved for funding as of Jun 15 th, 391 for journal articles, 25 for books and 9 for book chapters. Funding has also been recently granted to a first Open Access conference proceedings. Journal articles remain the vast majority of the funded outputs and will continue to do so, but the number of funded books and book publishers keeps steadily growing too. The stats module provides an up-to-date classification by funding request status, including those that have been conditionally approved, formally approved and paid, those that have been put on hold and those for which payment is being processed. The table below shows the evolution of the number of requests in the main statuses every second month since the Pilot was launched. Approved/Paid Requests Rejected Requests Incomplete Requests 6 th Pilot report Jun 15th 316 218 176 5 th Pilot report Mar 31st 240 173 162 4 th Pilot report Jan 31st 210 137 130 3 rd Pilot report Nov 30 th 116 57 124 2 nd Pilot report Sep 30 th 43 20 34 1 st Pilot Report Jul 31 st 11 14 24 Table 1.- Evolution in the total number of requests by request status (data as of June 15th) The comparison between the number of formally approved and/or paid requests as of June 15 th (316) and the number of approved funding requests mentioned above (421) means that 25% of the approved requests are still undergoing an approval process at the time of reporting normally waiting for an adequate invoice to be provided by the publisher or (in case of a reimbursement) by the institution. This is a slight increase from the figure in the last report (20%), which shows that the rate of collection of funding requests is increasing. This report provides an insight into how long it usually takes from a funding request to be paid since it gets submitted. 1.2. Rejected funding requests While still significant, the number of funding requests received for manuscripts accepted at hybrid journals is decreasing, partly thanks to the wide dissemination of the list of over 150 fully Open Access journals that have been funded so far. Nevertheless, publication in hybrid journals is still the most frequent cause for rejection as shown in the table below. During the last few months there have been a number of rejections of manuscripts accepted while the project was still running, as well as some requests for articles that had not been submitted to any journal. Total number of rejected requests 218 manuscripts accepted in hybrid journals 141 previously published articles 50 ongoing project (not post-grant) 10 unpublished paper 7 refused by project coordinator 4 non-existing journals 3 not Open Access 2 other 1 Table 2.- Total number of rejected requests by cause (data as of June 15th) FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 6 th progress report (Jun 15 th, 2016) 2 of 6
1.3. Reimbursements Even when the preferred workflow for the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot is to directly pay the APC fee to the publisher at manuscript acceptance time, reimbursements to institutions are also being offered for already paid APC fees. Around 20% of all funding requests is paid via reimbursements to institutions a figure that has remained fairly stable in the last reports.. Total number of reimbursements 78 ES 20 DE 10 CH 9 NL 6 IT, UK 5 FR, SE 4 FI 3 BE, PL, TR 2 AT, DK, HU, IE, IL, NO 1 Table 3.- Total number of reimbursed APC payments by country (data as of June 15th) 1.4. Funding request distribution by publishers and journals The approved funding request distribution by publishers keeps showing an increasing distance between the most popular publishers and the rest of them. Publishers that have signed a prepayment agreement with OpenAIRE are shown in red on the table, as their figures are expected to have a quicker growth in forthcoming months. Publisher Number of funded requests Previous position (Mar 31 st ) Journals NPG/Macmillan 77 (+21) 1 PLoS 57 (+9) 2 Frontiers 39 (+12) 3 BioMed Central 35 (+13) 5 MDPI 33 (+12) 4 Copernicus 23 (+4) 6 Institute of Physics 14 (+4) 7 Wiley 14 (+2) 8 Hindawi 10 (+4) 9 Books + book chapters InTech 6 (+4) 2 River Publishers 6 (+5) 4 Ubiquity Press 5 (0) 1 Springer 4 (+2) 3 Table 4.- Distribution of approved funding requests by publisher as of June 15 th, 2016. In brackets, the number of new approved funding requests since the last report on Mar 31 st, 2016. The list of the most frequently requested journals as of Jun 15 th is shown below, with the usual multidisciplinary titles on top, PLoS ONE, Scientific Reports and Nature Comms. The fact that the two most popular titles have reasonable low APC fees ( 1,165 and $1,495) is the main reason why the average APC fees paid by the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot are keeping stable (see evolution below). FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 6 th progress report (Jun 15 th, 2016) 3 of 6
Journal title Publisher Number of funded requests Scientific Reports NPG 51 PLoS ONE PLoS 42 Nature Communications NPG 22 Sensors MDPI 13 Biogeosciences Discussions Copernicus 8 Environmental Research Letters IoP 8 Frontiers in Microbiology Frontiers 8 Optics Express OSA 8 Cell Reports Cell Press/Elsevier 6 BMJ Open BMJ 5 Frontiers in Bioengineering and Frontiers 5 Biotechnology Frontiers in Plant Science Frontiers 5 PLoS Computational Biology PLoS 5 Table 5.- Distribution of approved funding requests by journal titles as of June 15 th (n>4) 1.5. Funding request distribution by countries, institutions and projects The funding request distribution by countries shows the usual countries well above the rest, while seven countries have already submitted more than 20 approved funding requests. Only five EU countries remain on the still-no-requests list: Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Malta and Romania. The prepayment agreements that are presently starting to be run are expected to significantly impact this distribution. Country Approved funding requests Spain 71 UK 64 Italy 44 Germany 40 Switzerland 24 Netherlands 22 France 21 Greece, Portugal, Sweden 12 Austria, Belgium 11 Finland 9 Hungary, Israel 8 Ireland, Turkey 7 Denmark 6 Norway, Poland 4 Lithuania 3 Australia, Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, 2 South Africa Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Croatia, 1 Luxembourg, Mexico, Slovakia Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Malta, Romania 0 (EU only) Table 6.- Distribution of approved funding requests by [requestor s] country as of Jun 15 th, 2016 FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 6 th progress report (Jun 15 th, 2016) 4 of 6
The distribution of funding requests by institution is featured in the live reporting module, where the full list can be obtained from together with the specific amount of funding allocated to each of them and the average APC fee paid in each case. The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), UPM in Spain, the University of Oxford, ETH Zürich, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the University of Helsinki lead this list thus far. In terms of funding request classification by FP7 project, the updated FP7 project classification by discipline (CORDIS field) is provided below for the FP7 projects that have collected funding as of Mar 31 st, 2016: Project research area Number of approved funding requests Marie-Curie Actions 104 Health 64 Information and Communication Technologies 57 ERC 53 Environment (including Climate Change) 35 Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Biotechnology 29 Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and new 22 Production Technologies Research for the benefit of SMEs 11 Transport (including Aeronautics) 10 Research Infrastructures 8 Energy 6 Socio-economic sciences and Humanities 5 JTI 4 Research Potential 4 Space 3 Security 3 Science in Society 2 Regions of Knowledge 1 TOTAL 421 Table 7.- Distribution of approved funding requests by project research area as of Jun 15 th, 2016. 1.6. APC fees paid: average and distribution The average APC fee paid by the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot as of Jun 15 th displayed here is calculated on the basis of the 394 APC fees currently coded into the system as approved funding requests for journal articles and book chapters. On this basis, the present average APC fee is 1424, FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 6 th progress report (Jun 15 th, 2016) 5 of 6
with a standard deviation of 430. The average payment has slightly decreased with regard to the average values collected in previous reports, but the figure has remained fairly stable since the beginning of the initiative, with lower-priced and very popular titles like Scientific Reports and PLoS ONE keeping the average fee under control and balancing the partial funding for journals with fees above the 2,000 funding cap. According to the data collected in the live reporting system, the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot budget spent in direct payments for Open Access publishing fees (i.e. APCs and BPCs) a year into the initiative is slightly above 500,000. When the amount of the pre-paid funds to publishers and institutions is added to this figure, the spent budget climbs to 800,000, and if the 200,000 funding to be allocated to the alternative funding mechanism is also added in, the Pilot has already committed its first 1m in funding. This is one quarter of the total budget for the initiative, and there is hence no risk that the funding will run out for funding requests to be submitted next year when the Apr 30 th, 2017 Pilot end-date gets closer (a question that is frequently asked by researchers involved in FP7 projects bound to finish later this year or early next year). The chart above shows the evolution of the average APC fee paid by the Pilot on the basis of the figures collected in this series of bi-monthly reports. The main factor in the rather small fluctuations in the average fee is the number of funding requests received in each reporting period for APC fees above the 2,000 funding cap: the largest increase in Oct/Nov 2015 was a result of the massive dissemination campaign via email carried out early Oct by the EC. The evolution in the number of requests for APC fees above the cap in subsequent months is shown in the table below. Jun 15 Jul 15 Aug 15 Sep 15 Oct 15 Nov 15 Dec 15 Requests 0 0 1 3 9 6 6 Jan 16 Feb 16 Mar 16 Apr 16 May 16 Jun 16 Requests 7 8 7 7 5 1 60 above-the-funding-cap requests have been received and approved by the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot as of Jun 15 th, 2016. This is approximately 15% of the total number of requests, and their monthly number remains fairly stable as the initiative progresses. FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot 6 th progress report (Jun 15 th, 2016) 6 of 6