The Open Access Policy at the NCN requires that publications resulting from the projects should be made available in Open Access, under the Creative Commons Attribution, CC BY licence (or, alternatively, in some cases: CC BY-SA or CC BY-ND).

In the annual and final reports of national projects supported by NCN, researchers should include publications that resulted from the research project and contain an ackonwledgement with the following information: the registration number, or decision number, or contract number of the project and the full name of the project’s funder.

Due to the provisions of the above policy, when submitting a publication in the report, please select one of the following licences under which the article was published:

  • CC BY - recommended default licence
  • CC-BY-SA - licence under which you can publish in journals under transformational agreements alternatively to CC BY
  • CC-BY-ND - licence permitted in cases agreed with NCN prior to publication

The "OA model" checkbox refers to the method of publication, the so-called publication routes. Choose one of the three routes allowed by NCN:

  • Route 1
    Open Access journal or platform registered or in the process of registration in the Directory of Open Access Journals - the publication was published in a so-called fully Open Access journal indexed in DOAJ
  • Route 2
    AAM or VoR of an article published in a subscription (hybrid) journal - the Author's Accepted Manuscript (AAM) or Version of Record (VoR) of an article published in a subscription (hybrid) journal, has additionally been published immediately (no embargo) in an open repository registered in the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), e.g. MOST Wiedzy
  • Route 3
    transformative journal or journal under transformative agreement - the article has been published in one of the journals that have committed to become Open Access journal. A list of transformative journals is available at Journal Checker Tool; transformative agreements must be registered in Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges registry

On 11.10.2023, NCN introduced a temporary relaxation of the provisions regarding the "Open Access Policy at the NCN" for final reports submitted until 31 December 2025. Changes in temporary relaxation:

  • Route 1 - all CC 4.0 licences will be accepted
  • Route 2 - embargoes will be accepted provided that:
        - immediately after its publication on the publisher’s website, a preprint of the publication is released, subject to a CC BY license, in a repository from the openDOAR database; the preprint must be given a valid PID number (DOI or equivalent);
        - once the embargo period has ended, the AAM version is published in an openDOAR repository
  • Route 3 - no changes
  • APC costs - no changes
  • Open research data - CC BY 4.0 licence will be accepted