Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Open Access Compliance Monitoring 2015

Since 2008 the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Austria's central funding organisation for basic research, requires from and supports all project leaders and project staff members to make their peer-reviewed research results freely available through the Internet.

All principal investigators of FWF funded projects are obliged to submit a final report three months after the project is finished. The average duration of an FWF funded project from the beginning to the delivery of the final project report is around 4.5 years.

Publications and other data from these reports are archived and evaluated by the FWF. The report at hand shall therefore evaluate the state and compliance of Open Access on the basis of publications from final project reports submitted in the year 2015.

Main findings:

• In total 6,241 publications were listed in the final project reports submitted in 2015.

• Out of these 4,580 could be clearly defined as peer-reviewed.

• Regarding the evaluation of the Open Access policy of the FWF, we enumerate a share of 83% of all peer-reviewed publications coming out of FWF projects being are openly accessible.

• FWF researchers appear more likely to choose Hybrid Open Access. Green Open Access The use of Gold Open Access has slowly but steadily increased over time.

• The majority of peer-reviewed publications submitted are journal articles with an Open Access share of 81% up to 87%.

• The lowest Open Access compliance can be found in editions, collected volumes and monographs with 18% to 26%.

• Although not compulsory, 42% of non peer-reviewed publications are freely available.

This publication contains a report and a dataset.