FP7 Post Grant Open Access Pilot
There are only three months left to claim funding for Open Access via the European Commission’s Post Grant Pilot scheme.
A total of €4 million have been allocated to the Pilot, designed to support open access publishing for EU FP7 projects that have finished no longer than 2 years ago. FP7 stands for Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, and this was the EU’s main research funding scheme. Between 2007 – 2013 over €50 billion was invested in research projects via the scheme. FP7 was eventually replaced with Horizon 2020 in 2014, which saw the budget increase to over €80 billion. The EC have stated that the Pilot will run until the funds are exhausted, but it also has a deadline which was recently extended to 28th February 2018. Access to the scheme is dependent on meeting certain criteria, all of which are outlined here https://www.openaire.eu/technical-requirements. Generally however, if your EU FP7 grant ended in the last 2 years, and you’re publishing in a fully open access journal, you could be eligible for funding.
- The first thing to check is that your grant is in the list of eligible projects (i.e. it ended in the past 2 years, and is included in the FP7 project database) – to check go to the Pilot website and search using the title or project code https://postgrantoapilot.openaire.eu/#home.
- Three publications can be funded via the Pilot per project
- Funded publication types include research articles, monographs, book chapters and conference proceedings.
Funding can be requested by researchers themselves or by administrators acting on researchers’ behalf. We (the Open Access Team in the Library) have signed up to the service and are ready and willing to take any requests forward, so if you think your next research paper might be able to make use of the Pilot please do let us know.