Open access and the data management plan

Every peer-reviewed publication arising from the project must be openly accessible immediately on publication, with no embargo. A machine-readable copy is deposited in a trusted repository, and the publication carries an open licence: Creative Commons Attribution, or an equivalent, with a more restrictive variant tolerated for long-text works such as monographs.

The beneficiary must retain sufficient rights to do this. That means checking the publisher agreement BEFORE signing it: assigning exclusive rights to a publisher and then discovering you cannot deposit the accepted manuscript is a breach you created yourself, and the usual remedy is a rights retention statement applied at submission.

Publication fees are eligible only for genuinely open-access venues. Fees paid to hybrid journals (subscription titles that charge to open a single article) are not eligible, which surprises researchers whose field is dominated by them.

Research data is governed by a DATA MANAGEMENT PLAN, a living document delivered early and updated during the project. The standard is data that is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, and as open as possible while as closed as necessary. Legitimate reasons to restrict include personal data, security, and a genuine intention to commercialise.

These are contractual obligations with financial consequences, not aspirations. Non-compliance can lead to reduction of the grant, and reviewers do check whether the publications listed in the periodic report are actually accessible. Budget for the fees and the repository work at proposal stage.