CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: EU funding

  • Horizon Europe’s Open Access Mandate for Monographs and Books: What Publishers Need to Know in 2026

    Publishers of academic monographs and edited volumes have a narrowing compliance window in 2026. Institutional guidance issued by research offices across the European Research Area has now confirmed what many university presses suspected was coming: the Horizon Europe monograph open access requirement is being applied as an immediate, no-embargo obligation, not the softer “within twelve months” allowance that long-form outputs enjoyed under Horizon 2020. For scholarly and university-press publishers still relying on embargo windows to protect print sales, the operational implications are significant.

    The shift matters because monographs and edited volumes occupy a different economic and editorial position from journal articles. Peer review cycles are longer, production costs are higher, and many presses depend on frontlist sales in the first year after publication to recoup costs. A mandate that removes the embargo option for Horizon Europe-funded books effectively forces a shift toward open-access business models — book processing charges, subvention funds, or collective funding mechanisms — well before most presses had budgeted for it.

    The Horizon Europe Monograph Open Access Mandate: What Changed

    Horizon Europe’s Model Grant Agreement has, since the programme’s launch, required beneficiaries to ensure open access to peer-reviewed scientific publications arising from funded research, with deposit in a trusted repository at the latest at the time of publication. For journal articles this has meant immediate open access with no embargo permitted — a marked tightening compared with Horizon 2020. Monographs, book chapters and other long-form outputs, however, historically sat in a grey zone: guidance permitted longer embargoes given the different production and revenue model of long-form scholarly publishing.

    Institutional research offices are now reporting that this grey zone has closed. Updated guidance interpreting the Annotated Grant Agreement treats monographs and edited volumes arising from Horizon Europe grants as subject to the same immediate open access expectation as articles, with limited scope for embargo exceptions and only where a beneficiary can demonstrate a documented conflict with legitimate commercial interests, such as a pre-existing publishing contract negotiated before the mandate took effect. In practice, this means grant-holders negotiating new book contracts from 2026 onward should assume zero embargo is the default position, not the exception.

    CC Licensing Rules for Long-Form Outputs

    The licensing dimension is equally consequential. Horizon Europe’s default licensing requirement is CC BY (or a licence with equivalent rights) for the version of record or the final peer-reviewed manuscript, with CC BY-ND permitted in specific cases where the beneficiary can justify it — for instance, to protect the integrity of a monograph’s narrative argument or illustrative content from unauthorised adaptation. For edited volumes with multiple contributing authors, this creates a coordination burden that journal publishers rarely face: every contributor’s chapter must carry a licence consistent with the funder mandate, and permissions for third-party material (images, maps, quoted text) must be cleared for reuse under an open licence rather than the more restrictive “all rights reserved” terms many presses still default to in contracts.

    Publishers should also note that Horizon Europe’s guidance treats the CC licensing requirement as attaching to the funded output itself, not to the press’s broader catalogue. This means a single edited volume may need to carry different licensing terms for different chapters if only some contributors were funded by Horizon Europe grants — a scenario production and rights teams need workflow support to manage rather than resolving case-by-case at proof stage.

    Which Horizon Europe Calls Are Affected

    The monograph mandate is not confined to a single funding stream. It applies wherever a Horizon Europe grant supports the underlying research, which means publishers should expect it across the full spread of Horizon Europe calls that fund book-length outputs — most visibly in Cluster 2 (Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society), where monographs remain a primary dissemination format, but increasingly in interdisciplinary projects funded through Horizon Europe cluster 5 calls (Climate, Energy and Mobility) where policy-facing edited volumes and technical assessment books are common outputs. The Horizon Europe work programme 2025 carried forward the same open access conditions into 2026-funded actions, so presses handling manuscripts from projects awarded under that programme are already inside the compliance window.

    Health-focused publishers should pay particular attention. Horizon Europe health calls 2026 continue to fund large collaborative projects that frequently produce edited clinical or public-health volumes alongside journal outputs, and the European Commission’s open science requirements apply equally to both formats. University presses that have historically treated health-adjacent edited volumes as a niche, lower-volume category may find that Horizon Europe-funded health projects now represent a disproportionate share of their open-access compliance workload, simply because health clusters fund so many large consortia.

    Attribution and Contributor Roles in Edited Volumes

    Open access mandates for long-form outputs also intersect with a separate but related trend: growing demand for standardised, machine-readable contributor attribution in multi-author books. Journal publishers have widely adopted the CRediT contributor role taxonomy to disambiguate who did what across large author lists; edited volumes with dozens of chapter authors face an analogous — arguably more acute — attribution challenge. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Presses building open-access metadata workflows for Horizon Europe-funded volumes should consider whether chapter-level contributor statements, alongside ORCID identifiers for editors and authors, would strengthen compliance reporting to funders and simplify downstream indexing by DataCite and CrossRef.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    For research offices and grant administrators, the practical consequences fall into four areas:

    • Contract review: existing book contracts negotiated before a project’s Horizon Europe award should be audited for embargo and licensing clauses that now conflict with grant conditions.
    • Budgeting for book processing charges: administrators should confirm with principal investigators whether monograph publication costs have been included in the project budget, since immediate CC BY publication is rarely free.
    • Repository deposit workflows: institutional repositories need to support long-form deposit (full manuscripts, not just abstracts) at the point of publication, which is a different technical and rights-clearance workload than article deposit.
    • Coordination with university presses: where the institution operates its own press, research offices should establish a standing liaison so that acquisitions editors flag Horizon Europe-funded projects at contract stage, not at the point of camera-ready delivery.

    Organisations such as EARMA and ARMA have both flagged long-form open access compliance as an emerging gap in research administration training, and institutions preparing for the next REF cycle in the UK should note that funder-mandated open access terms for books can diverge from REF open access requirements, creating dual-compliance obligations that need to be reconciled rather than assumed to be identical.

    Looking Ahead

    The direction of travel is unambiguous: funders are converging on the position that “open access” means immediate, machine-readable, openly licensed access regardless of output format, and the historical carve-out for monographs is narrowing across the research funding landscape, not only within Horizon Europe. Publishers that build book-processing-charge models, chapter-level rights workflows and CC BY-compliant production pipelines now will be better positioned as other funders — building on cOAlition S’s long-standing work on open access books — follow the same trajectory. For scholarly and university-press publishers, 2026 is the year monograph open access stops being a policy aspiration and becomes a contractual condition of funding.

  • Horizon Europe Open Access Requirements in 2026: A Practical Compliance Checklist for Grant Administrators

    Research offices reviewing Horizon Europe calls for proposals in 2026 face a familiar but persistent problem: the open science obligations attached to EU grant agreements are not optional add-ons, but they are also not uniform. Some provisions in the horizon europe open access requirements are contractual conditions with financial consequences for non-compliance; others are strongly encouraged practices that reviewers reward but auditors do not enforce. Grant administrators who conflate the two categories either over-engineer compliance workflows for recommendations that carry no penalty, or — more dangerously — miss a mandatory obligation buried in boilerplate annex text.

    With the horizon europe work programme 2026 calls now open across multiple clusters, institutions are fielding a fresh wave of applications, and pre-award teams need a working checklist rather than a policy summary. This article separates what is genuinely mandatory under the Model Grant Agreement from what is best-practice guidance, and sets out a practical review sequence research offices can apply to each new proposal.

    Horizon Europe Open Access Requirements: What Is Actually Mandatory

    The core obligation has not changed in substance since the start of the programme, though its enforcement has sharpened as later horizon europe calls 2026 reference updated annotated grant agreement language. Three elements remain non-negotiable for funded projects:

    • Immediate open access to peer-reviewed publications. Beneficiaries must ensure open access to any peer-reviewed publication arising from funded work, deposited in a trusted repository at the moment of publication — there is no embargo period available under the standard grant conditions.
    • A licence permitting reuse. Publications must carry a licence, typically CC-BY, that allows reuse, distribution and text/data mining, subject to proper attribution.
    • Bibliographic metadata and persistent identifiers. Deposited records must include funding acknowledgement, project identifiers, and — increasingly checked at reporting stage — persistent identifiers such as DOIs, ORCID iDs for authors, and, where applicable, Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifiers for affiliated institutions.

    These are contractual terms under the Model Grant Agreement. Non-compliance can trigger corrective action requests during reporting and, in persistent cases, affect payment of the final instalment.

    Data Management Plans and FAIR Data: Mandatory Process, Flexible Content

    The second pillar of Horizon Europe open science policy concerns research data, and this is where administrators most often misjudge the compliance boundary. Every project that generates, collects or reuses research data must produce a Data Management Plan (DMP), typically as a deliverable within the first six months and updated at least once more during the project lifecycle. Producing the DMP is mandatory. What the DMP says is not prescriptive in the same way.

    The underlying principle — data should be “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” — gives beneficiaries legitimate grounds to restrict access where commercial exploitation, personal data protection, security concerns or third-party rights apply. The FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) are the design standard the DMP must address, but FAIR does not equal fully open. A dataset can be FAIR-compliant with metadata openly discoverable while the underlying data remains access-controlled.

    Grant administrators should check that the DMP:

    • Identifies which datasets will be shared openly, and which are justifiably restricted, with a stated rationale for each.
    • Names a repository (project-specific, institutional, or a generalist option) and describes metadata standards to be applied.
    • Assigns responsibility for updates, since a stale DMP submitted once and never revisited is a common audit flag.
    • Addresses costs — data management and open access publication costs are eligible under Horizon Europe, and DMPs should reference the relevant budget lines.

    Recommended, Not Mandatory: Where Reviewers Reward Beyond Compliance

    A separate set of practices appears throughout horizon europe work programme guidance documents and evaluation criteria as encouraged behaviour rather than contractual obligation. Distinguishing these matters because over-promising in a proposal creates a self-imposed obligation that reviewers will later check against actual delivery. Common recommended-not-mandatory items include:

    • Open access to monographs and other long-form outputs, where CC-BY-ND is accepted as an alternative to full CC-BY.
    • Preprint deposit ahead of formal peer review, which is widely encouraged but not required for compliance.
    • Open access to software and code produced during the project, generally framed as good practice aligned with FAIR principles rather than a hard deliverable.
    • Citizen science and public engagement components, which strengthen an application’s societal-impact score without being conditions of the grant agreement.

    Bodies such as cOAlition S and national funders including UKRI maintain parallel but not identical open access frameworks, which is why administrators supporting international consortium partners should confirm which funder’s policy is operative for each work package rather than assuming Horizon Europe terms travel automatically to co-funders.

    A Practical Review Checklist

    For research offices triaging applications against upcoming horizon europe calls 2026 deadlines, a sequential review works better than a single long checklist. At proposal stage, confirm the DMP outline (even a short version) addresses data types, FAIR alignment, and repository choice; confirm ORCID iDs are recorded for all named researchers; and confirm the budget includes open access publication and data management costs as eligible items. At grant agreement stage, verify the consortium agreement assigns clear DMP ownership, confirm repository selection meets trusted-repository criteria, and check that publication clauses in any co-funding or industry partnership agreement do not conflict with the immediate open access requirement. At reporting stage, audit that deposited publications carry correct funding acknowledgement and persistent identifiers, and confirm the DMP has been updated to reflect actual project data outputs rather than left in its original submitted form.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    The practical risk in 2026 is not ignorance of the headline open access requirement — most institutions have internalised that peer-reviewed outputs must be openly deposited. The risk sits in the secondary layer: DMP maintenance treated as a one-off submission, persistent identifiers omitted from repository metadata, and proposal teams voluntarily committing to open code or open monographs that then become de facto obligations reviewers expect to see delivered. Building a standard pre-award checklist that flags mandatory versus recommended items separately — and assigning DMP review to the same office that tracks reporting deadlines — closes most of this gap without adding significant administrative burden.

    Professional bodies including EARMA, ARMA and INORMS continue to publish guidance aimed at exactly this administrator audience, and research offices new to Horizon Europe compliance should treat their briefings as a first point of reference alongside the Commission’s own annotated grant agreement.

    Looking Ahead

    As the horizon europe work programme 2026 cycle progresses, expect continued tightening around persistent identifier reporting and repository certification, mirroring trends already visible in national policies such as the UKRI open access update and NIH data sharing enforcement. Institutions that build DMP review and identifier hygiene into standard pre-award workflows now will find compliance easier to demonstrate as funders move from policy statements to systematic verification.