Support for Open Access Publication for the Financial Year 2021

Approved Norwegian research organisations may apply.

Requirements relating to the Project

The research organisation listed as the Project Owner in the application form must be an approved Norwegian research organisation (see above) and must have authorised the submission of the grant application to the Research Council. The project administrator and the project manager must be the same person.

Approved Norwegian research institutions (see above) may apply for funding to cover article processing charges incurred in 2021.

Articles must be published in a journal that is:

• An approved scientific publication channel at level 1 or 2 listed in the channel register of the Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir);
• registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

The scheme does not cover the cost of publishing fees in subscription-based “hybrid” open access journals.

Calculating support

The STIM-OA scheme will provide support for research organisations’ publication costs by covering up to 50 per cent of the organisations’ costs for open access publication from the financial year 2021.

Conditions for funding

Support from the Research Council to a research organisation is to be reserved for the organisation’s non-economic activity, and as such therefore does not constitute state aid. The Research Council requires a clear separation of accounts for the organisation’s economic and non-economic activities.

If your grant application is funded, the following must be in place: From 2022, grant recipients in research organisations and the public sector (project managers and partners) must have action plans for gender equality (GEP) available on their website. This must be in place before entering into a contract for projects with grants from us. The requirement does not apply to private business, special interest organisations or the voluntary sector.

Funding is disbursed after the contract with the Research Council has been signed and an invoice for the approved funding amount has been submitted to the Council.

You can change and submit your application several times up to the application deadline. We recommend that you submit your application as soon as you have completed the application form and uploaded the mandatory attachments. When the application deadline expires, it is the version of the application that was submitted last, which we process.

Applications are processed by the Research Council administration and must fulfil the following requirements.

• The applicant/Project Owner must come from an eligible category of institution.
• The grant application must lie within the scope of this call.
• The funding amount sought and the expenses to be covered must be in keeping with the framework of the call.
• The budget must be formulated correctly to clearly indicate what the funding will cover.
• The application form must be fully completed.
• The required attachments must be included using the designated templates.
• The application and all attachments must be written in Norwegian or English.
• Only one grant application per institution may be submitted.
• Costs for which funding is sought must be entered within the project period of 1 October 2022 to 31 December 2022.
• All articles for which article processing charges have been incurred in 2021 must be entered in a separate list using the designated template found at the end of this call. The list must be as complete as possible. Required fields are marked with an asterisk. Articles lacking complete information in the required fields will be deleted from the list. The list, which must be submitted by the application deadline, must:
  • be uploaded as an attachment to the grant application in PDF format using the field for Project description.
  • be sent as an Excel file (using the designated XLSX template) to stim-oa@forskningsradet.no.

Grant applications that do not satisfy the above formal requirements will be rejected.

Guidelines for completing the application form

• Project Owner: the project administrator and the project manager must be the same person.
• Funding plan: total costs entered into the funding plan for article processing costs incurred in 2021 must be distributed between “Own financing” (50 per cent of the entire amount) and “Amount sought from the Research Council” (50 per cent of the entire amount).
• The full amount, i.e. total costs of the article processing charges (APC) from 2021, shall be entered under Other operating costs in the cost plan.

Links to websites and documents, as well as other attachments than those specified above, will not be included in the application review process. There is no technical validation of the content of the attachments you upload, so please make sure that you upload the correct file for the selected type of attachment.

The STIM-OA call is handled administratively. This means that the administration reviews the submitted lists of articles and checks whether they meet the requirements of the call for proposals.

If the total amount sought exceeds the funds available, an equal percentage of reduction will be made among all applicants.

The final decision regarding funding is expected to be announced in November 2022.