NWO and ZonMw Open Access Monitor 2023

"In this report we analysed the openness of publications from research funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) for the publication year 2023. This research has been conducted exclusively on openly accessible research information and metadata.

Overall, based on the available data, 94.6% of the articles analysed (6,254 out of 6,610) have been made available open access (OA) using one of the available open access routes. This is an increase compared to 2020 (85%), 2021 (90%) and 2022 (93%). It should be noted, however, that because of different data sources and methodology used in the previous studies comparisons need to be made with caution. This percentage is 94.8% for NWO-funded output and 91.9% for ZonMW. There is an overlap of 868 articles (13% of the total number of articles) that have received funding from both NWO and ZonMw.

At least 70% of the NWO and ZonMw funded publications from 2023 (4,633 out of 6,610) has been published open access immediately, with a CC-BY (or CC-BY-ND) licence, via either the Gold, Hybrid (under a transformative agreement) and for 8 papers the Green OA route. For this report we consider these publications as fully Plan S compliant, which is mandatory for NWO and ZonMw funds granted from 2021 onwards. It should be noted that the majority of the current publications analysed are most likely from grants awarded before 2021 and therefore fall under the previous open access policies of both NWO and ZonMw.

While 100 percent open access remains the goal for both funders, other aspects of open publishing are becoming ever more important, such as quality aspects of open access in general (i.e. proper use of licensing, adding funder acknowledgements if applicable, etc.). Internationally, concerns are growing about the dependency on an increasingly smaller group of commercial publishers for academic publishing, the rising costs associated with publishing, and the equity and accessibility of open access publishing for less well funded countries and regions in the world due to high publication costs...."