Publishing via the Green Route

Are you about to share your scientific findings? If so, you will soon come across Open Access, a movement that aims to make science freely available to anyone interested, rather than hiding it behind paywalls. By publishing your research openly, you increase its visibility and contribute to a fairer world where knowledge is accessible to all, regardless of institutional or financial barriers. This way your work will also circulate more quickly and has a higher likelihood to be read by policymakers, health care professionals, and curious individuals around the globe. This increases the impact of science and strengthens its social relevance. However, obstacles such as high publication costs, restrictive publisher conditions, and complex licensing structures can make fully open access publishing difficult.

This is why Green Open Access deserves special attention. This approach provides researchers with alternative methods to make their work publicly accessible at no additional cost, typically through institutional repositories or preprint servers. In this article, we provide an overview of two forms of Green Open Access, including their legal and practical frameworks.

The Taverne Amendment

Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, also known as the Taverne Amendment, grants authors of short scientific works the right to publish their work after a reasonable period (set at six months), regardless of any restrictive guidelines imposed by publishers.

However, the six-month embargo period of the Taverne Amendment does not meet the requirements of some research funders. Always check the conditions of your funding body to see if immediate open-access publication is required.

At Radboud University/Radboudumc, we use the Taverne OPT-OUT regulation. This means that your publication will be made public in the Radboud Repository six months after its initial online publication date. The "publisher version" will be made available to the public. If your publication is not available online after six months, we may not have access to the full text. If this is the case, please email the Radboud Repository (dare@ubn.ru.nl) with a PDF of your publication.

Right Retention Strategy (RRS)

The RRS enables you to share the author-accepted manuscript (AAM) immediately under a CC BY license, even if the publisher restricts this. This enables you to comply with open access publication requirements from your funder.

When submitting your publication, include a rights retention statement in the accompanying letter indicating that your funding body requires immediate open access. Authors funded by NWO or the European Commission (cOAlition S funders) are strongly encouraged to include an RRS statement with their submission, even if they wish to take advantage of a national publisher deal. Even if the maximum number of articles (CAP) has been reached for the year, you can still meet your funding body's requirements with an RRS statement.

You can find a standard RRS statement on your funding body's website or in the Rights Retention FAQ.

If your manuscript is accepted with an RRS statement, you must upload the accepted manuscript (AAM) to the Radboud Repository yourself.

More information:Open Science - Radboudumc

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