Open Access Policy

ASAP’s Open Access Policy

Open access (OA) refers to a set of policies that allow for research outputs to be distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers. ASAP’s mission is to create a future where meaningful collaboration, research-enabling resources, and data sharing give us the answers we need to understand, diagnose, and treat Parkinson’s disease.

By supporting an OA policy, we facilitate the rapid and free exchange of scientific ideas, ensuring that the research we fund can be leveraged for future discoveries. Our guiding principles are modified from the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science. We believe that: 

  1. Science is based on collaboration – building on, reusing, and openly criticizing the published body of scientific knowledge.
  2. For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavors, it is crucial that science data be made open.
  3. The ultimate value of data can often not be predicted and with advancing technologies and analytics, prior data could be reanalyzed for new insights and innovation. 

Key Components of the ASAP Open Access Policy

There are five key components to ASAP’s OA policy:

  1. Immediate free online access upon publication with grantees retaining copyright via CC BY 4.0 license (or equivalent) for unrestricted reuse.
  2. Manuscripts posted in an OA preprint repository upon submission to a journal for review (or sooner). 
  3. All research outputs (data, protocols, code) deposited in publicly accessible repositories and cited in the publication. 
  4. Appropriate attributions to ASAP funded work.
  5. Utilizing our Research Output Management System (ROMS) to track research outputs within the ASAP virtual grantee platform  known as the ASAP Hub. 

All work published with partial or full support by ASAP must be credited and published according to ASAP’s OA policies. Only grantees that are fully compliant with our OA policy will be considered in requests for follow-on funding requests.

ASAP requires that all publications adhere to the following:

  • Immediate free access: Peer-reviewed, author accepted research must be made freely available immediately upon publication, without any embargo period (zero embargo).
  • Unrestricted reuse rights: Articles must be published under the Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY 4.0, or under the CC0 license which does not require attribution, or equivalent. Both licenses permit reuse of the material without restriction.

If other funders of a multi-funded grant (which ASAP also partially supports) are concerned about adhering to our policy, ASAP will engage in discussion with the other funder(s) to understand their concerns. Contact us at [email protected] to initiate discussion. Grantee compliance with our OA policies will be monitored vigilantly so we urge such discussion prior to publication when there are contravening circumstances. Below are details on how to comply with our requirements.

How to ensure immediate free access?

This guidance is designed to permit publication in any journal of choice while complying with our requirements of immediate free access to and unrestricted use of your original research publication.

  • Route 1 (preferred): Publish in a gold or hybrid journal that offers immediate OA of the final edited version of the journal article (known as the version of record [VoR]) and accepts a CC BY or equivalent license. Most gold and hybrid journals also accept the CC BY license. If they do not, it will be necessary to follow Route 2.
    • Gold journals provide immediate OA for all articles.
    • Hybrid journals provide OA for an additional fee on some articles but do not allow all their articles to be freely accessible.
  • Route 2 (discouraged): Publish in a subscription-only journal and deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM; the version following peer review that is accepted by the journal) in Pubmed Central under a CC BY license. Under this option (known as the “green” option), the AAM must be available to the public immediately upon the journal’s publication of the VoR (the final citable publication). Note that a few hybrid journals do not accept the CC BY license, in which case you’ll need to follow this route.  

Route 2 is less desirable because the AAM does not reflect copyedited revisions, updates, or corrections to the paper. However, the AAM can be linked to the VoR for those who wish to read or cite the canonical version. If you are considering this route, please email [email protected] to discuss why Route 1 is not possible. ASAP will not cover the APC associated with publishing if this method is chosen. 

Note, that in our funding considerations, we will consider the intrinsic merit of the work, not the title or journal impact factor (JIF) of the journal or publisher. This is in line with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), of which we are a signatory.

ASAP support: coverage of reasonable Article Processing Charges (APCs)

To assist with compliance, ASAP will pay reasonable Article Processing Charges (APCs) for open access research articles.

ASAP works with our implementation partner, The Michael J Fox Foundation (MJFF), to provide coverage when applicable for APCs. To apply for coverage, grantees can complete an online form here.

When the request is submitted, you will receive an email from the ASAP team, through MJFF, confirming receipt.  The ASAP team will review your request within 3-4 business days and notify you via email of the decision regarding the request. We may reach out for additional information needed to facilitate the review. The timeline for review may extend depending on your response time and the quality of additional information provided. Once you’ve received a positive decision on your request, you can forward to the ASAP team the notification from the publisher that payment is due upon final editorial acceptance of the paper. This will probably include a link to request a payment invoice.  We can then begin the process of requesting a payment invoice from the publisher to MJFF and arrange for payment directly to them on your behalf.  As a final step, we will send you a copy of the confirmation of the payment we received from the publisher. 

How to ensure appropriate CC license for unrestricted reuse rights?

For any preprint or publication, you must apply a Creative Commons (CC) Attribution license or public domain license to all Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) arising from submissions to peer-reviewed journals that report original research. Below are the types of licenses that are compliant with ASAP’s open access requirement.

  • CC BY (also known as CC BY 4.0) is the default license required for all research papers. The license ensures that you receive attribution for the work (intellectual ownership) but allows your work to be freely shared (redistributed in any medium or format or adapted for future purposes).
  • CC0 license is applied to authors employed by the government, or for other content in the public domain. Under this license, no attribution is required.
  • CC BY-ND can be applied in exceptional cases. Under a CC BY-ND license, no derivatives of the original content are permitted (i.e., the content remains unchanged). In these cases, you must email [email protected] prior to publication acceptance to explain the reasons for the exception. We will consider on a case-by-case basis. Please note that we do not allow CC BY-NC-ND as a licensing option. For more on why we do not allow non-commercial licensing, please read the rationale from cOAlition S under the header “Licenses”.

In the rare event that there is disagreement with the publisher regarding the licensing requirement and immediate online access requirement, contact ASAP at [email protected] to assist.

To ensure appropriate licensing, you must:

  • Include language that your submission carries a CC BY public copyright license (or CC0, CC BY-ND if appropriate) in the acknowledgment section of your submitted manuscript (to both the preprint server and the publisher). See “Acknowledgements” in Requirement 4 for required language. Click here for required language.
  • Determine whether the journal will include the CC BY (or CC0, CC BY-ND) license in the published VoR (the final version of record published by the journal). Journals typically list the license terms of an article under a rights and permissions or a copyright tab. If you cannot find this information, you can also send an email to the publisher.
    • If the preprint server or journal has the appropriate licensing, and the article is being published in an open access journal (gold or hybrid), do nothing. The journal will submit your article to PubMed Central (PMC) or Europe PMC upon publication.
    • If the preprint server or journal does not have the appropriate licensing, and/or if the journal is subscription-only, consider selecting another publication venue, or if necessary, submit the AAM to PubMed Central so that it appears at the same time the VoR is published. 

Preprints, which are early versions of research work yet to be formally peer reviewed, must be submitted to a public preprint server – such as bioRxiv or medRxiv – upon submission to a journal, or sooner. If sooner, the preprint may change by the time of final journal submission. Preprint manuscripts submitted at the time of journal submission must be identical to the version submitted for publication, linking to research outputs, and carrying the appropriate CC license as described above. 

Upon publication of the peer-reviewed article, the preprint must link to it. This is usually done automatically by bioRxiv or MedRxiv when the final publication appears in most journals if the Title of the article remains unchanged. Note that if you have published in a subscription journal that does not have open access options, then the preprint would link to the author-accepted manuscript which carries the CC BY or equivalent license posted in PubMed Central (PMC). Europe PMC is a partner of US-based PMC; articles submitted to the US-based open repository will automatically appear in the UK-based sister repository.

In addition to ensuring open access to preprints and published manuscripts, ASAP’s open access policy requires that funded researchers maximize the availability of research data, code, and other materials or resources underlying research findings.

Research outputs including datasets, protocols, software, and new lab resources generated that support preprint and final research papers must be made available to other researchers in recognized community repositories at the time of manuscript submission, as well as any original software that is required to view datasets or to replicate analyses.

Underlying research outputs encompass all primary data, associated metadata (with the exception of protected health information (PHI) or electronic protected health information (ePHI)), and any additional relevant data necessary to understand, assess, and replicate the reported study findings. Research outputs could include software, datasets, protocols, tools, and reagents used. This is critical to enable collaboration and to allow others to verify, reproduce, and reuse data in new ways. In addition, careful recording and management of research output offer provenance and preservation for future inquiries.

These policies are aligned with existing industry best practices, including data availability policies required by several publishers.

Please note that ASAP endorses the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship that were published in Scientific Data in 2016. These guidelines are intended to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets. 

The core requirements of ASAP’s policies and the FAIR principles are:

  1. All relevant dataset files are described by adequate metadata. 
  2. All datasets are assigned a globally unique and persistent identifier that is included in the core metadata.
  3. The persistent identifier and adequate metadata are registered or indexed in a reliable, searchable resource.
  4. Ensure that the ASAP Acknowledgements are included in the repository record.

Repository selection for underlying data and software

There are many data repositories, so ASAP can recommend data repositories for which all funded work can be deposited, and we will work with teams to identify the appropriate platforms. Please note that any data repository of your choosing must adhere to the following:

  • enable immediate open access to the underlying data upon posting of your preprint and submission of your manuscript to a journal;
  • allow reuse with licensing no more restrictive than Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0);
  • assign your dataset with a persistent and unique identifier, such as a DOI (digital object identifier) or Accession number to facilitate linking and citation; and
  • provide long-term storage and preservation, such as those that meet the ISO’s trustworthy digital repository standards.

For questions about recommended repositories, please email [email protected].

Repositories for protocols, lab resources, and software

Protocols: Experimental protocols that are employed in ASAP-funded research must be made publicly available (and updated as needed) through a protocol sharing service such as protocols.io. ASAP will provide support to grantees in using the protocols.io platform. Sharing and discussing scientific methods is crucial to achieving credible, reproducible experimental research.

Lab Resources: All tools or reagents that are funded by ASAP and/or result from ASAP awarded projects must be made readily available to the community and citable as a means of supporting reproducibility and to enable further research. For questions about recommended repositories, please email [email protected]. For assistance with citing lab resource tools, take a look at the Resource Identification Portal that aggregates information from multiple repositories and provides identifiers for citation in publications.. This requirement applies to cell lines, transgenic models, plasmids/clones, antibodies, and other reagents.

Software: Software, including algorithms, scripts, and other code-based research outputs, must be made available through code repositories like GitHub and assigned a DOI. If it is difficult or impossible to assign a DOI through the code repository, Zenodo can also assign a DOI to code hosted elsewhere.

All publications and outputs resulting from partial or full support by ASAP — either during the award, or after the funding period has ended — must be credited with reference to the grant ID of the project and a named affiliation to appear in the Author Information section for an ASAP-funded investigator.

Acknowledgments

The following language must be included in the acknowledgments section of the publication or other research output, such as dataset, software, resource, or protocol. If there is not a specified place for Acknowledgements, use the notes or detail area of the record:

This research was funded in whole or in part by Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s [Grant number] through the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF). For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY [replace with CC0, CC BY-ND if appropriate] public copyright license to all Author Accepted Manuscripts arising from this submission.

Author affiliations

We want to ensure that the public can track who ASAP funded grantees are, therefore we ask that ASAP is also included in author affiliations.

  • For the ASAP Collaborative Research Network – In addition to an investigator’s home institution, an ASAP-specific affiliation should be designated as such: Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) Collaborative Research Network, Chevy Chase, MD, 20815.
  • For the ASAP Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2) – In addition to an investigator’s home institution, a GP2-specific affiliation should be designated as such: Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2), Bethesda, MD, 20814.

ASAP is developing a custom-built Research Outputs Management System (ROMS) to help grantees track research outputs using persistent identifiers and adequate metadata to permission-based sharing. Our goal is to retain a catalogue of where ASAP research outputs are located so that we can enhance access to resources generated within our Network for the entire research community. Usage of the ROMS will be incorporated into end of year reports and factor into future follow-on funding decisions.

Contact us

If you have any questions, email [email protected].

Note, these policies will ultimately be housed on the ASAP website in perpetuity and will be referenced as such in the award contract. This is a living document and will be updated accordingly.

Last updated: December 14, 2021