The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) have both issued new open access policies which will contribute to making research more available.

The announcement on the Policies on Open Access to Research Articles from Publicly Funded Research, was made on May 15, during a briefing on the coming Annual Meeting of the Global Research Council to be held in May 26-28, 2014, in Beijing, China.

CAS will require its researchers and graduate students to deposit the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of their research articles resulted from any public funding, submitted and consequently published since the issuing of the policy, into the open access repositories of their respective institutes, to be made open access within 12-months of their official publication.

CAS will also encourage researchers to deposit previously published articles into their respective institutional repositories as well. CAS will also support researchers to publish in open access journals with good quality control and affordable APC.

NSFC will require the researchers funded by it to deposit the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of research articles resulted from its funding, submitted and consequently published since the issuing of the policy, into the NSFC open access repository, to be made open access within 12 months of their official publication in academic journals.

Open access policy discussions were a focus of the EIFL-funded open access advocacy project implemented by the CAS National Science Library in 2013.

The project contributed to developing and sharing of good practices of open access in China, including open institutional repository development and services, open access policies implementation, and open access publishing support.

EIFL is vey pleased with these latest developments, as the original goal of the project was to push forward a national open access agenda and to make a bridge for the international collaboration and communication.

We would like to congratulate both the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) on their new open access policies.

See the Chinese and English versions of the CAS Open Access Policy.

See the news from NSFC (nsfc.gov.cn/publish/portal0/tab88/info44456.htm) here (in Chinese). The Chinese version of the NSFC OA Policy is here [PDF] and the English version is here [PDF].