Something that makes our colleague Catherine Brendow cringe as an open access publication librarian: researchers contacting her because their SNF-funded article has just been published behind a paywall and asking me “What can I do now?” Unfortunately, we don’t have a magic wand. If you plan ahead (and sometimes opt for an alternative journal), the process will be much smoother.
Your grant comes with certain conditions
First: if you are funded by the SNSF, you must publish your research output open access, without an embargo. If you publish in a journal covered by our Read & Publish agreements (currently Cambridge, Elsevier, Oxford, Taylor & Francis and Wiley – we are in a no-deal situation with Sage and Springer), or in a diamond journal, there is no issue. The same applies if you publish in a fully Gold OA journal, as the SNSF covers the publication fee. They also cover publication fees for books or book chapters. If, for any reason, you cannot publish open access (“gold route”), you can instead take the “green route” of self-archiving.
Another condition applies to SNF grantees: Journal articles must be published under a CC BY licence. There is currently no licence requirement for books or book chapters.
Retain your rights
The “green route” mentioned above involves uploading your accepted manuscript (the final version before formal typesetting) to an open access repository: the Graduate Institute repository, another university’s repository if your co-author is affiliated with it, and/or a disciplinary repository such as SocArXiv. The problem is that most publishers still impose embargo periods, while the SNF does not accept any embargo. So what can you do? The SNF’s answer: apply the Rights Retention Strategy. But you need to plan ahead, even though journal embargoes have generally decreased or even eliminated over recent years.
This means clarifying the situation with the publisher at the time of submission. You (and your co-authors, if any) wrote the paper — you therefore hold the copyright. At submission, you must clearly state that you are funded by the SNF and that you reserve your right to immediately publish your accepted manuscript upon formal publication under a CC BY (Attribution) licence. This is your commitment if you are funded by the SNF — or any other funder member of cOAlition S.
If you did not plan ahead…
You can also take the green road, but we will have a tough choice deciding whether to comply with your mandate (no embargo) or the publisher’s policy (embargo of 6, 12 or even 24 months). Unfortunately, I have no clear answer to this conundrum.
Remember that you can take the green route even if you don’t have any funding. It is in your interest to make your research as accessible as possible. Feel free to contact Catherine with any further questions.
Cover picture: CC BY-NC-SA SNSF 2016
Geneva Graduate Institute Library Blog 