Open Policy for Research

Research subject to the Open Policy should contain the following elements:

All OpenEPI relevant research, including articles accepted for publication, will be published under “Open Access” terms. All research created or funded by the OpenEPI, including articles accepted for publication, shall be published under the CC BY 4.0 license, or an equivalent license. This will permit all users to copy, redistribute, transform, and build on the material in any medium or format for any purpose (including commercially) without further permission or fees being required.

• Authors of OpenEPI research shall retain sufficient copyright in their research to ensure that articles accepted for publication are deposited into an open-access repository and published under the CC BY 4.0 or an equivalent license.
• Publications and underlying data will be accessible and open immediately. All OpenEPI relevant research, including articles accepted for publication, shall be available immediately at publication, without any embargo period.
• The research data must be dedicated to the public domain using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) Public Domain Dedication, or licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0), or an equivalent license.
• Each accepted article must be accompanied by a Data Availability Statement that describes where any primary data, associated metadata, original software, and any additional relevant materials necessary to understand, assess, and replicate the reported study findings in totality can be found.
• OpenEPI can require that underlying data supporting the accepted article shall be immediately accessible and open upon article publication. Entities applying for OpenEPI compliance are encouraged to adhere to the FAIR principles to improve the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse of digital assets.
• Publications will be available in a public open access repository. Accepted articles shall be deposited immediately upon publication in PubMed Central (PMC), or in another open access repository, with proper metadata. In addition to depositing the article in an open access repository, entities applying for OpenEPI compliance are encouraged to deposit their accepted article in a subject specific or institutional repository of their choice.
• Preprints of submitted manuscripts are encouraged. While not needed to fulfill the Open Policy requirements, entities applying for OpenEPI compliance are encouraged to deposit research consisting of their submitted manuscript, and its subsequent versions, on a preprint server under the CC BY 4.0 license.
• Compliance is a requirement for all research funded by OpenEPI. Compliance will be continuously reviewed and authors will be contacted when they are non-compliant. Non-compliant research will not be encompassed by the OpenEPI dataportal or by other OpenEPI channels.