Abstract

The Alternative Funding Mechanism for APC-free Open Access journals and platforms implemented by the European Commission FP7 Post-Grant Open Access (OA) Pilot are described. This funding initiative, rolled out by the OpenAIRE project, aims to test the workflows around gold OA publishing, for titles that do not charge processing fees to their authors. The funding consists on specific technical improvements, according to plans proposed by journals and approved in previously selected bids. The main areas where these technical enhancements are being implemented are listed.

Abstract

With the support of governments, research funding agencies or academic institutions, Open Access is taking hold in the field of scholarly communication. More and more cases are found where recommendations on Open Access publication are transformed into obligations that researchers must comply with. Plan S, the Spanish Law on Science, Technology and Innovation or several university mandates are some examples of this change in trend. Given this situation, it is necessary to check compliance with these mandates from at least two points of view, on the one hand, to ensure that publications are in Open Access and on the other hand, that they comply with the established deadlines. So far, several attempts have been made to monitor compliance with the mandates from different perspectives, however, few have considered the time frame in which a publication must be in Open Access. To improve this monitoring, we propose the use of existing information in the repositories, such as, information on the funders, date of publication of the work in the academic journal and date of deposit in the repository, as well as the presentation of this information through the OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative – Procotol for Metadata Harvesting). In this way, monitoring could be improved at the institutional level. In addition, this information could also be collected by harvesters such as Recolecta, so that they can become a tool for monitoring Open Access publication mandates at the national level.