Research funders announce open access policies

China’s top science funding agencies – the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China – have issued new open access policies on research in a move to make research widely available. The academy said open access would “facilitate knowledge dissemination and accelerate the globalisation of science”.

The announcements came in advance of a meeting of the Global Research Council, or GRC, which brings together leaders of funding agencies from around the world. This year’s annual meeting will be held in Beijing next week – from 26-28 May.

China has been supportive of the GRC’s action plan for open access to publications.

The National Natural Science Foundation of China, or NSFC, said in a statement: “NSFC requires its relevant departments to actively collaborate with relevant governmental departments and public education and research institutions to facilitate all open access to publications resulting from all government science and technology plans or generated from publicly funded projects.”

Effective immediately, it said, the authors of research papers generated from projects fully or partially funded by the foundation should deposit final peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted by journals in the NSFC repository for an embargo period of no more than 12 months.

“Earlier open access should be provided if the publisher allows this,” the foundation said.

Academy statement

The Chinese Academy of Sciences, or CAS, issued a statement – posted on its website – noting that researchers and graduate students would be required to deposit final peer-reviewed manuscripts of research articles into the open access repositories of their institutes within 12 months of official publication in journals.

“CAS requires its institutes to set up repositories to preserve research articles authored by their members that resulted from publicly funded research projects, and to provide open access through [the] internet to the public,” it added.

Xiaolin Zhang, director of the academy’s national science library, said the Ministry of Science and Technology was also actively involved in developing policies to promote open access.

In a video interview with open access publisher Biomed Central in March, Zhang described the development of open access in China as being in “high gear”.

The Chinese government had been a firm supporter of open access for some time, he said, adding that former premier Wen Jiabao had said at a national innovation congress in 2012 that all information produced by public funding should be openly available.

“This year, the state council leadership also issued a directive that all the funding agencies should promote open access for publicly funded research results. Of course we still need to work on this and in this we need and welcome collaboration from the publishers,” Zhang said.

In a paper published in March, he said that discussions on open access policy details were “getting lively”, with topics including embargo periods and effective ways to transform domestic journals into open access.

“One further issue – very important but yet to be addressed by the funding agencies and libraries – is whether and how to promote and organise transition of library acquisition budgets into open access funds,” Zhang said.

The academy already had other measures in place, including allowing its researchers to use research funds to pay for article processing charges for open access journals, he said, noting that CAS had begun to develop a network of repositories for its institutes.

Open access journals

A survey of Chinese scientific society journals carried out in 2011 found that some 308 journals out of a total of 820 were already open access. About half the open access journals allowed immediate access and the rest provide delayed open access. The survey revealed the number of open access journals in China had grown from 140 titles in 2007 to 308 in 2011.

In a statement, the academy said it recognised the contribution of open access to science and research. At the same time, it realised that open access would continue to evolve for “further improvement, policy harmonisation and new sustainable models”.

“CAS asks its relevant departments to actively collaborate with the concerned domestic government agencies to facilitate open access to research articles supported by national research programs and foundations,” the statement said.

“And to cooperate with international scientific communities to promote an international convention for open access to achieve coordinated efforts towards healthy and sustainable development of open access.”