Open Access en Open Science
There are many definitions for Open Access but basically the idea of Open Access is that scientific publications should be online available for everyone without the need to pay an access fee.
Open access is one component off the broader Open Science context in which all aspects of the 'research lifecycle' are addressed. Think of Open Data, Data management plans, Citizen Science ...
More information about Open Science is bundled at https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/research/policy/open-science/
Open Access policy at UAntwerp
The Open Access policy entails the obligation that all UAntwerp authors have to add the pdf of the final author version* or an Open Access publisher version when they register a peer reviewed journal article for inclusion in the Academic Bibliography.
Submitted final author’s versions of journal articles will be made Open Access available according to the publisher copyright policy and/or the Belgian Open Access regulation.
* The term ‘final author’s version’ means the last submitted peer-reviewed manuscript. Also referred to as ‘author accepted manuscript (AAM) or post-print.
The Belgian Open Access regulation
Open Access publication models and funder requirements
Gold Open Access
Here the author pays the publisher a fee (author processing charge or APC) to make the final version of the work immediately Open Access available on the publisher's platform. Very often these publications are made available under one of the creative commons licenses. In this model users don't need a subscription to a journal or have to pay an access fee.
Green Open Access
Under this model a researchers makes his work Open Access available by self-archiving the last submitted peer-reviewed manuscript in an institutional repository. Self-archived manuscripts are often made accessible after an embargo period.
Since 2018 this model is supported by the Belgian Open Access regulation (Art. XI.196, §2/1 Wetboek Economisch recht). The Belgian Open Access regulation gives authors the right to make the manuscript of a scholarly article available in Open Access if the publication is a result of research funded by public funds for at least 50%, with a maximum embargo period of 12 months for the social sciences and humanities and 6 months for the other sciences.
Rights Retention Strategy
If your funder obliges you to publish immediately with Open Access, the Green Route is no longer a viable option due to the imposed embargoes. However, there is still a way to utilize the Green Route, known as the Rights Retention Strategy. To implement this strategy, you should apply an open license to your manuscript when submitting it to a journal. Once the final version of your paper is published, this manuscript can be made publicly available via the institutional repository of the university. Make sure to communicate this clearly to the publisher when submitting the article, as the publisher is not obligated to agree and may only grant it as a favor.
Here's an example of how to communicate this to the publisher:
"This research was funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe grant [grant number]. As stated in the Grant Agreement, the author must ensure immediate open access at the time of publication, provided under the latest available version of the Creative Commons Attribution International Public Licence (CC BY). To comply with this requirement, we intend to provide a Green Open Access version of this manuscript with a CC BY license in our Institutional Repository, without an embargo, right after publication. Consequently, this license has already been applied to the submitted preprint."