Research funding and financing

Research funding organizations and institutions demand free access to publications and research data. Below is an overview of some institutions and their requirements:

SNSF

The SNSF supports the principle of Open Access and expects its grant recipients to make their research results publicly available for re-use in electronic form.

• SNSF projects approved as of 1.1.2023: Article immediately in open access without embargo, license: CC-BY.
• SNSF projects approved before 1.1.2023: Articles no later than six months after first publication
• Published books an book chapters have to be open access after 12 months. 

The Open Access obligation also applies to all other publications if at least 50% of the underlying research is SNSF-funded.

Detailed information on the SNSF regulations can be found here.

Further information:

• SNSF Open Access to Publications
• SNSF's new Website to Open Access
• SNSF Regulations and Guidelines
• SPARC Author Addendum

Horizon Europe and ERC Grants

Peer-reviewed publications which result from funded Horizon Europe projects must be available in open access.

• immediately upon publication, a machine-readable, digital copy of the publisher-version or the final, peer-reviewed and accepted manuscript must be deposited and made available in a trustworthy repository for scholarly publications (for example: BORIS).
• The publication has to be made available under the latest version of the Creative Commons Attribution International Public License (CC BY) or an equal license. Monographs  and other long-form texts can use more restrivtive licenses such as CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND.
• Open access publishing costs are only paid for peer-reviewed publications which are published in pure open access publications (no hybrid OA)

This link will take you to the Model Grant Agreement which has further details about metadata, identifiers, etc.

Questions? openaccess@unibe.ch

Publish OA free of charge

Diamond Journals

Diamond Journals do not charge any fees for authors or readers. They are usually published without commercial publishers by researchers on institutional platforms such as Bern Open Publishing. Quality assurance with peer review.

Repositories

You can republish the accepted or published version of an article on a recognized repository (e.g. BORIS or Zenodo) with a CC BY license. Inform the publisher before or at the time of submission that you are not transferring the corresponding rights (rights retention). (Rights Retention).

Preprints und Peer Review

On review platforms (PCI, Review Commons, PreReview), articles can be reviewed independently of journals and published OA. Manuscripts are uploaded to preprint servers and submitted to one of the platforms for review. The peer-reviewed and if necessary revised articles are accessible as reliable and citable OA publications on the preprint servers or can be published in a journal associated with the platform.

Funding from funding organisations

SNsF

The SNSF finances journal articles from funded projects in Gold OA publications.

The SNSF also supports books and book chapters in Gold OA outside of funded projects. 
From January 1, 2025, the SNSF will only fund APCs via Chronos Hub. The SNSF will no longer reimburse costs paid by researchers themselves. The SNSF will only reimburse costs paid by researchers themselves until December 31, 2024.

Horizon

Publication costs must be included in the budget at the time of submission.

Funding through UniBe

OA Fund of the University of Bern

The University of Bern supports its researchers in financing APCs and BPCs with an Open Access Fund:

• APCs for articles in Open Access Gold: max. CHF 2,500.
• BPCs for books and book chapters in Open Access Gold: max. CHF 8,000

Read & Publish agreements

The University of Bern has concluded Read & Publish agreements with a number of scientific publishers. Researchers from the University of Bern and Insel can publish Open Access in most of these publishers' journals at no cost to the authors.