The SNSF considers open access to publicly funded publications as an obligation. For this reason, it requires all publications resulting from SNSF funding to be openly accessible. To facilitate widespread use of content, articles must also be published under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY licence.
The SNSF does not accept any embargo periods for articles. For books and book chapters, a period of 12 months is permissible. So that researchers are not restricted by publishers in the use of their own content and can meet the OA obligation, the SNSF has introduced the Rights Retentions Strategy developed by cOAlition S. This means that researchers use a standard formulation when submitting an article manuscript, e.g. by including the following statement in the acknowledgements field: “This research was funded in whole or in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) [Grant number]. For the purpose of Open Access, a CC BY public copyright licence is applied to any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission.”
The authors immediately make their “Author’s Accepted Manuscript” (including changes following peer review, but excluding layout and other services of the publisher) freely available via a repository.
