In September 2018, Science Europe (the association of European research funding organisations, including NWO) announced that all publications from research funded by participating organisations must be published in so-called Gold Open Access journals by 2020. On 31 May 2019, the final Plan S guidance was published. Plan S is developed to accelerate the transition to Open Access and requires all publications from research funded by public grants, to be published Open Access. Read more about this subject in the links below.

Roadmap open access 2018-2020

The ambition of the Netherlands is to achieve 100% open access by 2020. Agreements have been made with many publishers about open access publishing. Unfortunately, this is not possible for all types of publications or journals. However, Dutch copyright law offers an alternative.

Article 25fa of the Copyright Act (Taverne Amendment) allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles & book chapters), regardless of any restrictive publishers’ guidelines. On the basis of the Taverne Amendment, the publishers’ versions of short scientific works can be made available after six months via the university repository. It is important that the researcher explicitly asks for this. From January 1, 2020, the VSNU will roll out the use of the Taverne amendment widely within the affiliated universities.