Research Council of Finland (former Academy of Finland) open science requirements

Applicants must include a publication plan and a description of measures to ensure open access as part of their research plan.

Requirements in the calls opened before 1 January 2021 

Open access of research publications is required, but embargoes (publication delay periods) are allowed:

• Humanities and social sciences: 12 months 
• Other fields: 6 months 

The requirement particularly concerns peer-reviewed scientific articles.

In calls opened before 2021, publication fees (open access fees, article processing charges) may be included in the research costs of the project.

Requirements in the calls opened after 1 January 2021 

Peer-reviewed articles shall be made immediately open access according to Plan S principles in one of the following ways, under a free and immediate open license: 

1. by publishing articles in open access journals under CC BY license
   • Use the Journal Checker tool to search for Plan S compliant journals.
2. by publishing articles under transformative agreements in hybrid journals or in transformative journals under CC BY license
   • Use the Journal Checker tool to search for Plan S compliant journals.
3. by self-archiving author accepted manuscripts (AAM) immediately open access e.g. in an institutional repository (ACRIS in Aalto University) under CC BY license
   • Embargoes are allowed in self-archiving (up to 12 months for social sciences and the humanities, up to 6 months for other scientific disciplines), if the publisher refuses immediate self-archiving.
   • Please note that only few publishers allow CC BY license for author accepted manuscripts (AAMs).
   • Use the Journal Checker tool to search for Plan S compliant journals.

• Publishers usually offer the option of publishing the article gold open access or via transformative agreements (options 1 and 2) to comply with Plan S principles. Authors are always encouraged to check publishers’ Plan S compliant options before submitting their papers. 
• If you are unsure of the open access policy by a certain publisher and possibilities to comply with Plan S, please contact Open Science and ACRIS team at [email protected] for guidance and help.

Open access publishing fees:

• Costs of ensuring open access to scientific publications published in Plan S compliant journals that support immediate open accesscan be covered by basic funding / included in the overheads of sites of research.
  • Aalto's transformative open access agreements may cover the fees. All our agreements are Plan S compliant. For full open access journals, only discount on open access fee is usually provided by the agreements; the whole fee is not covered.
  • Apart from transformative agreements, Aalto University does not have a central open access fund. If you publish in a Plan S compliant journal which is not covered by our agreements, please contact your department controller.

Please note:

• CC-BY 4.0 is the preferred open license, but deviations from this requirement is possible by using CC BY-SA 4.0, CC0 or CC BY-ND. Read more on Creative Commons licenses. 
• The Research Council of Finland also urges researchers to publish conference articles and monographs with open access.
• Regardless of the chosen method of open access, the scientific publications of Research Council funded projects must be archived in a repository that guarantees long-term storage for and free open access to the publication (ACRIS in Aalto University).

Data Management Plan (DMP) 

At the application stage, unless differently specified in the Research Council of Finland call guidelines.

• Briefly describe your data management practices 

After a positive funding decision 

• Write the actual data management plan and deposit it to the Research Council’s SARA system within 8 weeks of the decision 

Open data requirements 

The data must be opened whenever possible.  

However, it is possible not to open data, if there is a justified reason for that, for example if the data contains trade secrets or if there is personal data that cannot be anonymized. If the data cannot be published, create a metadata description of your data and deposit it into a data archive/finder. In Aalto the suitable system is ACRIS.  

In the case the data can be exploited by commercialization, it may be possible to open the data after the commercialization activities. Read more on commercialization and opening the research results: Publishing and commercialization, can I have both? 

Check the Data management and openness instructions of Research Council of Finland

Research Council of Finland: Open access to scientific publications

Academy of Finland to adopt reforms to open access publishing and responsible researcher evaluation from beginning of 2021  

Research Council of Finland open science policy 

Always check the up-to-date information from the funders' instructions. 

Guide for Data Management Plan (.pdf)

Data Management Plan template (.docx)

Data Management Table example for DMP (.docx)

Guide for Research Infrastructure Data Management Policy (.pdf)

Template for Research Infrastructure Policy (.docx)