In April 2019, Independent Research Fund Denmark, the Danish National Research Foundation, and Innovation Fund Denmark adopted their joint Open Access policy. Below, you can read the policy's content and download letter templates for publishers regarding the publication of research articles and Open Access.
Research advances knowledge and drives intellectual, social, and economic development. The foundations consider it vital to enhance the impact of research by ensuring unimpeded and cost-free digital access for everyone to publicly funded research results. Open Access (OA) means free and unrestricted access to research results in the form of publications in journals and conference series. OA thus provides society with access to, insight into, and the opportunity to utilize research results.
Since June 2012, the public foundations in Denmark have maintained a joint policy on OA. Building upon Denmark's National Strategy for Open Access, which was adopted in June 2018, the goals and requirements for OA were tightened.
To realize and support the heightened national goals and requirements for OA, the public foundations in Denmark have revised their joint foundation policy. Moving forward, the foundations will continuously monitor and stimulate the realization of the national OA strategy, among other measures by introducing requirements for grant recipients regarding OA.
More specifically, with the revised policy, the foundations wish to contribute further to the expansion of OA as the standard for scientific publications in the form of Green Open Access. The objective is for all scientific articles that have been quality-assured through peer review and accepted by a scientific journal to be readable and distributable without financial, technical, or legal restrictions.
The policy dictates that published scientific articles resulting from full or partial funding by the foundations must be made freely accessible to everyone via OA, provided the journal allows it.
With this policy, the foundations also aim to ensure that researchers have a stronger standing regarding the copyright of their own articles in connection with scientific publishing.
Furthermore, the foundations endorse the Berlin Declaration on OA to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which represents a milestone in the definition of and work with OA.
The purpose of Open Science is to make research, methods, and results publicly and digitally accessible. If the journal allows it, the grant recipient is required to parallel-publish a digital version of the final, peer-reviewed scientific article accepted by a scientific journal. The article, which is the result of full or partial funding from the foundations, must be parallel-published in an institutional or subject-specific repository (i.e., a digital archive).
If required by the journal, the parallel publication of the scientific article may take place after an embargo period (i.e., a period during which the article is exclusively available in the scientific journal) of up to 6 or 12 months following publication in the scientific journal.
The embargo periods for the specific fields of research shall be as follows:
The final, peer-reviewed scientific article, which is parallel published, must include all graphic and other materials prepared for the article. Research data are exempt from this requirement.
The grant holder is responsible for ensuring that relevant publishing or copyright agreements with publishers comply with the foundations' terms of the grant in connection with parallel publishing. Furthermore, the foundations desire that the grant holder retains copyright to the greatest extent possible.
Compliance with these terms of the grant must be in accordance with applicable copyright rules.
The requirement for parallel publishing exclusively covers scientific articles and conference contributions in journals and proceedings with an ISSN.
Thus, the requirement for parallel publishing does not cover:
For the grant holder, this policy means:
I. That in connection with the acceptance of an article for publication in a scientific journal, the grant holder must seek to retain the rights to parallel publish a version of the peer-reviewed and accepted scientific article.
Pursuant to Denmark’s National Strategy for Open Access, research institutions and university colleges must inform and assist researchers regarding the practical use of the infrastructure for OA publishing, for instance through clear guidelines and support staff.
The foundations encourage that the use of hybrid Open Access (also known as "double dipping", which involves paying both a license fee and an article processing charge to release an article for OA) is minimized as much as possible.
It is thus accepted that a journal’s quality level can be prioritized over the consideration to publish in OA. Therefore, publishing in an Open Access journal is exclusively recommended if a journal of a high, recognized quality level is deemed to exist within the field.
II. That in connection with publication, possibly following the end of an embargo period, the grant holder ensures that the article is parallel published in an institutional or subject-specific repository.In case of doubt regarding the specific procedure for parallel publishing, please contact the research library at the relevant institution or the responsible operator of the subject-specific digital archive.
III. That in connection with reporting to the foundations, the grant holder provides information on whether publication has taken place with Open Access regarding scientific publications fully or partially funded by them.
If articles, as a result of full or partial funding from the foundations, are published in OA after the final reporting, the foundations must be informed of this.
The foundations will monitor whether grant holders publish via OA. Furthermore, the foundations will continuously assess whether there should be consequences for grant recipients if they neglect to publish their research results via OA when possible.
Use the templates below in your dialogue with the publisher that publishes your research article. This applies to the template for the letter to the publisher regarding Open Access and the template for the addendum to the publication agreement.
Contact letters to publishers in danish (pdf)
Contact letters to publishers in english (pdf)
Terms of the publication agreement in dansk (pdf)
Additions to the publication agreement in english (pdf)
Title: Senior Adviser
Email: hki@ufm.dk
Phone: +45 7231 8246
