Funding Opportunities & Guidelines
In addition to the funding open access publication costs by the University Library of Freie Universität Berlin, members of the university can and should also consider applying for third-party funding from national and international research funders. Many funding organizations support open access to research results and have established their own open access policies as well as funding opportunities. At the same time, international organizations, such as the European Commission, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (USA), or the Wellcome Trust (UK), often require that publications resulting from funded projects have to be published open access.
Below you will find the most important funding options for financing open access journal articles. However, the currently valid funding guidelines on the website of the funding organisations are always binding. Please feel free to contact us for advice if your funding organization is not listed.
- Coalition of national and international funders (including the EU, FWF, ANR, UKRI, SNSF, Gates Foundation)
- Mandatory since 2021: open access publication for funded projects
- Support in selecting compliant journals via the Journal Checker Tool
- Financial support for publication costs is generally provided
- Further information can be found on the cOAlition S and Plan S website
- Commitment to open access and open science in Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe
- Publications must be published under a CC BY license in an OpenDOAR repository
- Project funds may be used for fully open access journals (provided scientific quality standards are met)
- Open Research Europe: additional platform for preprints and open peer review
- Further information can be found in the grant agreement
- Open Access as a standard of the joint guidelines of the federal government and the Länder (2023),
- Publication costs can be covered by project funds during the project period,
- Further information can be found on the open access website of the BMFTR (in German).
- Funding opportunities through numerous foundations (e.g. Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Volkswagen Foundation, political foundations (in German))
- Publication subsidies are often provided in the context of ongoing research projects
- Search options: Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (in German), Association of German Foundations, as well as search terms such as “publication costs”, “publication subsidy”, “publication funds”, “publication grant”, “printing cost subsidy”, or “printing cost grant”
- Open Access is required for research results from funded projects
- Funding for publication costs may be applied (up to €750 per year, cumulative over the project duration)
- Additional project funds may be used to cover publication costs
- No funding for standalone publication applications without relation to a funded project
- Further information can be found on the DFG website on open access and in the General Terms and Conditions for Funding Agreements (in German)
Further information can be found via the Open Policy Finder, which lists the world’s most important research funders and their open access policies, as well as on the platform open-access.network, which provides an overview of funding requirements and practical guidance.