We believe that the key to defeating MND lies in fostering strong collaboration between leading researchers around the world and sharing new understanding of the disease as rapidly as possible. To achieve this we will promote proactive good management and open sharing of samples, data, research outputs and information. We will also promote and participate in a dialogue with the research community to optimise the research environment. Our open access policy forms part of this intention.
Open Access Policy
Grantees of awards from the MND Association from 2011 onwards are mandated to make their peer reviewed papers directly arising from the grant available through open access. These research papers should also be available within the Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) repository as soon as possible but within six months of publication of the paper.
The MND Association:
- Expects authors of research papers to maximise the opportunities to make their results available for free
- Requires grantees of awards from the MND Association from 2011 onwards to make their peer reviewed papers, directly arising from the grant, available through open access. These research papers should be available within the Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) repository as soon as possible but within 6 months of publication of the paper
- Provides a model for payment of open access fees for awards from 2011 onwards. Costs for payment of open access fees should not be incorporated into applications for research grant funding and will not be included as part of our grant awards. Where research has been jointly funded by another organisation, requests for open access fees will be considered on case-by-case basis
- Encourages grantees of awards made prior to 2011 to make their full text papers available within Europe PMC
- Encourages (and where we pay an open access fee require) authors and publishers to licence research papers such that they may be freely copied and re-used (for example for text and data-mining purposes), provided that such uses are fully attributed
- Affirms the principle that it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, that should be considered in making funding decisions
Useful Documents
Europe PMC
Europe PMC provides a stable, permanent and free-to-access online digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences research publications. The content is freely available and can be accessed by all researchers, and not just those based at an institution that subscribes to a particular journal.
Why do our grantees have a Europe PMC account?
The Association is a member of the funders group of Europe PMC. As a result, an account has been created for one principal investigator from each of our grants in the private, ‘Europe PMC plus’ section of the Europe PMC database. All grantees have been given a Europe PMC account to maximise opportunities to make their research available through open access and to access the tools available for measuring impact.
MND Association grantees whose awards were agreed from April 2011 onwards are mandated to deposit the full text of any peer reviewed papers arising from their grant within Europe PMC. In some cases, the papers will need to be uploaded by the grantee using their Europe PMC account.
For more information please see our Grantee Guide to Open Access.
What are the benefits of having a Europe PMC account?
A Europe PMC account gives grantees an opportunity to track their publications and measure the impact of their research grant. The database can link full text publications to MND Association research grants. It can also extract all the papers in the database published as a result of MND Association funding.
Anyone visiting the Europe PMC website searching the ‘grant finder’ section of the website for a researcher’s name will see grants awarded to them from the MND Association as well as from other members of the funders group.