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Swiss National Science Foundation joins cOAlition S

01/06/2022

cOAlition S is excited to welcome on board the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) – one of the European leaders supporting Open Access – as the latest organisation to join the international consortium of research funding and performing organisations committed to delivering full and immediate Open Access to scientific publications.

The SNSF announced today their decision to join cOAlition S. “Research thrives on collaboration. And by joining forces we research funders can also best achieve our shared goals, including open access to scholarly articles,” stated Research Council president Matthias Egger, adding that “cOAlition S has shown that it can drive this structural change”.

As a long-time supporter of Plan S and now a member of cOAlition S, the SNSF will take steps to bring the new, Plan S-aligned, Open Access requirements into effect on 1 January 2023. This means that researchers supported by the SNSF must make their articles freely available immediately – and not after a six-month embargo as is currently the case. In addition, the SNSF plans to introduce the CC-BY licence, which both protects the interests of researchers as the authors of their works and enables broad use.

Johan Rooryck, Executive Director of cOAlition S commented: “SNSF is a very strong addition to cOAlition S. The adoption of the Plan S principles by the most important Swiss funder shows that full and immediate open access is rapidly becoming the accepted best practice across the scholarly landscape”.

The SNSF funds excellent research at universities, from physics to medicine to sociology. In 2021, SNSF invested 882 million francs in research (approx. 860 million euros), supporting around 1.800 new research projects. At the end of 2021, 5.700 SNSF-funded projects were underway, involving 20.000 researchers and leading to over 13.000 scholarly publications.

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