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 September 2022, the NHMRC revised its open access policy upon signing to cOAlition S – an organisation aimed at increasing the amount of open science.

The NHMRC Open Access Policy now stipulates:

• Any publication arising from NHMRC-supported research must be made available immediately upon publication. This applies to new grants issued after 20 September 2022.
• All publications from grants granted prior to 20 September 2022 must be made open access in a repository within a 12-month period from the date of publication.
• All new publications must have a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY licence.

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 Research Engagement 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.

Both the ARC and NHMRC allow for up to 10% of the project budget to be allocated to the payment of article processing charges.

Learn more about open access publishing

ARC & NHMRC policy compliance flowchart (AOASG)

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