The Luxembourg National Research Fund and ChronosHub: Lessons learned from implementing an Open Access Management platform

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2022.10.180Get rights and content
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Abstract

Luxembourg is well-known for its continuous efforts to develop a world-class research and innovation landscape and often ranks 1st for ‘Attractive research systems’ [1] on the European Innovation Scoreboard. In this context, the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) plays an important role and introduced its first open access policy in 2017 to ensure that all publications from its funding becomes freely accessible. The FNR also set up an open access fund to cover Article Processing Charges (APC) for these publications. To implement the policy and make sure its funding eligibility criteria were met, data had to be collected and checked manually for each payment request, which involved a high volume of administrative work for both grantees and administrators.

Prompted to find a solution to address these challenges, FNR and the Luxembourg National Library (BnL) started a pilot in 2020 together with ChronosHub, an open access management platform. By mid-2021, the pilot phase ended and FNR, BnL and ChronosHub transitioned into long-term operation to streamline open access management on a national level, tying in with all research institutions in the country. Subsequently, all APC payments related to FNR grants are managed through the ChronosHub platform. Authors can do compliance checks for each journal before submission, and upon article acceptance the data ingestion, funding eligibility checks, APC payments and reporting are now more automated. As a result, more authors benefit from getting their APCs funded. However, there are still challenges causing manual work, especially for APCs beyond FNR's funding cap as the institutions, in such cases, need to cover one part of the APC.

This paper is a write up of the presentation given during the CRIS2022 conference in May 2022, giving an overview of the initiative, and its problems, solutions, lessons learned and remaining challenges.

Keywords

Open Access Management System (OAMS)
Article Processing Charges (APC)
funder policy compliance

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