Learn how ChronosHub and partners in Luxembourg have collaborated to create an Open Access management platform that is responsive to the needs of all stakeholders – reducing time spent on administration and making more time for world class research.
Research is a key part of making Luxembourg a diverse and sustainable knowledge-based society by 2030. Open access is playing a leading role in achieving this goal. To power up research in Luxembourg the government have consistently increased research funding, taking it up to 1.7 billion euros in the 2022-2025 period. Therefore, it is of national and international importance that publicly funded research is freely available.
The Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) are the main funder of research in the country and amongst a range of activities, work to raise public awareness of research. Since 2017 they have required their grantees to make their published research Open Access via a range of different routes.
Researchers navigating these publishing requirements need to check if their publishing route will comply with FNR’s Open Access policy and if FNR will pay for the Open Access fee – also known as an Article Processing Charge (APC).
Working in an advisory capacity, FNR support the government of Luxembourg with defining the national research policy and strategy. To align FNR’s Open Access policy with an international standard FNR joined cOAlition S, a consortia of research funders in Europe and beyond. As part of this FNR have adopted the Plan S Open Access publishing policy.
The national library, Bibliothèque Nationale du Luxembourg (BNL), FNR and some of the Luxembourg institutions have negotiated publishing agreements that allow researchers from Luxembourg to publish Open Access without a fee in a selection of journals.
Outside of publishing agreements FNR manage an Open Access fund to pay for APCs for researchers. If an article passes the funding eligibility checks, FNR will fund the publishing costs in transformative and gold Open Access journals up to 2500 EUR. This means that for APCs over this amount, FNR will invoice Luxembourg institutions for APCs exceeding the FNR funding cap.
Publishing according to different policies and working out which publishing routes are eligible for funding can be a tricky task for many researchers and administrators. FNR, BNL, and ChronosHub originally collaborated to create a platform that verifies Open Access funding and compliance, as well as providing high-quality data and reporting for FNR. The FNR platform displays publishing agreements and enables payment to publishers, so there is no need for researchers to pay out of budget and have costs reimbursed.
Looking to the future, the next obvious step was to streamline the process for managing APCs related to FNR and Luxembourg’s institutions. A comprehensive solution that started with FNR and BNL has been rolled out to the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg Institute of Science of Technology (LIST), and Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH).
Increasing collaboration with institutions in Luxembourg will further unburden researchers and administrators. Transferring the process onto a platform gives researchers the time to focus on their research and publishing work, because they will have an extensive overview of the compliant and funded OA routes available to them.
Researchers from collaborating institutions will now have a single route to process all their APC funding requests, regardless of whether they are funded by FNR or not. Institutions will be able to manage their own Open Access funds, separate from FNR. Additionally, Article Processing Charges (APCs) that exceed FNR’s caps will be handled through a dashboard that gives each institution an overview of the amount spent on Open Access publishing.
As an optional extension for the institutions, researchers can be supported with the collection of metadata and full texts for all articles. This data will then be collected from publishers and authors to auto-populate Pure, once again removing administrative pressure.
The Luxembourg National Research Fund and ChronosHub: Lessons learned from implementing an Open Access Management platform, Procedia Computer Science, Volume 211, Issue C, 2022
Beard, R., Jakobs, T., Jagerhorn, M.