Funding bodies, policies and compliance

A number of funders require research articles which have resulted from their funding to be made open access. Sage helps authors comply with these mandates either via the gold open access publication route or green open access archiving.

Funder Agencies' Open Access Mandates

Please check with your funder if there is a mandate to publish your research open access and the criteria for compliance. There are other resources which may also be helpful:

• Sherpa/Juliet aims to give accurate funding compliance information and licence section information where applicable
• Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) is a resource which aims to collate information about open access mandates by university, research institution and research funder
• National Institutes of Health (NIH) website provides public access compliance information for research it funds

Compliance via Gold Open Access Publication

Many funders include open access publishing fees or article publishing charges (APCs) within the research grant or by bloc grants directly allocated to institutions. Upon acceptance, authors will be given the option to make the article open access either by:

• Publishing in fully gold open access journals where all the content is open access for an APC is charged. See a full list of Sage’s Pure Gold OA Journals.
• Or, making their article immediately available open access on payment of an APC in an otherwise subscription-based journals via the Sage Choice program.

Some funding institutions require authors who opt for gold open access publication to pick a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to be compliant with their mandate. Sage offers a choice of Creative Commons licences to authors who opt for gold open access publication in most OA journals. In order to comply with a funder which required CC BY licencing, authors are asked to select the CC BY option on the licence form after acceptance of the manuscript. All other funded authors should select the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence (CC BY-NC) where available.

The following funding institutions require grantees who publish their work immediately gold open access to pick a CC BY licence. N.B. This is not an exhaustive list. 

Funding Agency Open Access Deposit Requirements

Several funding agencies have deposit requirements for papers produced from research the agency has funded. Sage’s Green Open Access policy supports authors in meeting these requirements. Read more about specific funder requirements.

Compliance via Green Open Access archiving

Authors may be able to comply with funder mandates by archiving their work in an institutional or subject repository following Sage’s open access archiving policies.