DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3931234
title: Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Open Access Compliance Monitoring 2019

description: <strong>I. Executive summary</strong> The Austrian Science Fund (FWF), which is Austria's main funding organisation for basic research, encourages and helps all project leaders and project staff members to make their peer-reviewed research results freely available on the Internet. Any exceptions must be clearly indicated and justified. For projects that started after 1 January 2015, open access has been compulsory for all peer-reviewed publications. All principal investigators in FWF-funded projects are obliged to submit a final report within three months of completing their projects. In 2019 all in all 565 final reports were submitted to the FWF, 44 out of them couldn't report publications by now. The publications and other data mentioned in those reports are archived and analysed by the FWF. This report examines the state of compliance with open access requirements on the basis of final project reports submitted in the year 2019. Main findings: -A total of 9.353 publications were listed in the final project reports submitted in 2019. -Of those publications, 7.326 were conclusively identified as peer-reviewed. -Regarding compliance with the FWF's Open Access Policy, the analysis shows that 89% of the peer-reviewed publications that are listed in the submitted final reports of FWF projects in 2019 are openly accessible (2015: 83%, 2016: 92%, 2017: 90%, 2018: 92%). -The most frequently chosen option is hybrid open access (40%). The share of old open access is 19%, the share of green open access 22% and other open access 8%. -The majority of peer-reviewed publications submitted are journal articles (91%), 91% of which are openly accessible. -The lowest rate of compliance with the FWF's Open Access Policy can be found in editions, contributions to edited volumes and monographs (42%). -Although open access is not compulsory for non peer-reviewed publications, 43% of those publications are freely available through the internet. -The absolute number of publications listed in final reports in 2019 includes 565 publications that are mentioned several times in different projects; however, those repetitions do not ultimately affect the relative share of open access publications (89%). <strong>II. Bias</strong> Half of the publications were entered in the FWF’s database manually and with utmost care when the final project reports were received. Nevertheless, it is not possible to rule out minor errors entirely. The other half has been submitted to the FWF via a research documentation system (provided by ©Researchfish) in which FWF-funded researchers are able to enter and update their research data on an ongoing basis. The last check of the open access status was performed in January 2020. In some cases, the embargo period may have already expired, and publications labelled other open access in the FWF’s database may now be accessible through green open access. Whenever the status "peer-reviewed" could not be clearly identified according to FWF guidelines, the publications were classified as non peer-reviewed. Openly available non peer-reviewed publications were entered as 'openly available'.