Funding mandates

Australian research institutions such as the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the National Health Medical Research Council (NHMRC) mandate that research be made open access.

If you are applying for a research grant, you will need to meet these mandates. We can assist you in meeting these compliance obligations.

Australian funding mandates

Australian Research Council (ARC)

The ARC Open Access Policy outlines the open access obligations of ARC funded research. If you receive an ARC grant you must meet the following requirements:

• Any publication arising from an ARC-supported research project must be deposited into an open access repository with a twelve (12) month period from the date of publication.
• A record of your research output should be made available within three months in an institutional repository. ACU's institutional repository is Research Bank.
• You may license your work with a Creative Commons licence to specify access and usage rights.
• The ARC's preference is to use a Creative Commons by Attribution Licence (CC-BY), but you may choose to use any of the Creative Commons licence options.
• The ARC Open Access Mandate applies to scholarly publications but not to research data.

National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)

In October 2025 the NHMRC in conjunction with the Medical Research Future Fun (MRFF) released an Open Science Policy, which now mandates:

• At least one version of a research paper (preprints, peer-reviewed preprints, author accepted manuscripts and versions of record) to be:
  • made immediately open access, that is, without any embargo period at the time of first online publication.
  • published with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.
• Metadata for research papers to be made open access in an institutional repository as soon as possible, but no later than 3 months after first online publication.
• Researchers to take reasonable steps to share research data and associated metadata, using an ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’ approach, adhering to the CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles.
• Scholarly books, book chapters, and edited research books to be made open access where possible.

Meeting open access requirements

Deposit to Research Bank

Depositing your research with ACU’s institutional repository Research Bank is one way you can comply with mandates.

The version you will need to submit is called an author's accepted manuscript.

An author’s accepted manuscript is the version of your article that has been through the peer review process with revisions made and has been accepted for publication.

This version has been formatted and should not include publisher formatting, branding, or pagination.

To have your manuscript deposited in Research Bank contact the Research Engagement team or email your manuscript to libresearch@acu.edu.au.

Publish in an Open Access journal

You can also publish in an open access journal, but this may incur additional costs such as article processing charges.

Your funder may allow use of some of your grant budget to support your article processing charges for open access publishing. Please check your own funder policy guidelines for details and limitations.

Learn more about open access publishing

ARC & NHMRC policy compliance flowchart (AOASG)

Download ARC & NHMRC policy compliance flowchart (PDF, 178KB)