I remember reading about a law requiring all publicly founded research in Europe should be published as open access. Is it correct? Is it in effect? Should I ask this on the main site? (paper got accepted and now I'm panicking)

@Wrzlprmft ping, just in case :P see ^ thanks :)

@Federico I have never heard of such a law, but when in doubt ask whoever funded your research. If there is such a law it is broken on a daily basis.

You could ask the question on the main site nonetheless. But when you do, make sure to phrase it in a way that avoids comments telling you that you should publish your research nonetheless.

Instead I will make that comment now: Look into your copyright agreement (or similar) with the publisher and see what they allow in terms of publishing preprints. If they do, I see no good reason not to put the preprint on the Arχiv or similar.

@Federico I cannot recall if it's a law, but the recently started European projects in which I'm involved, yes, require open access publishing (in fact, we usually make an estimate on the number of papers that we will publish and ask funding for them in the project). But it's not retroactive: for another project that ended last year, we didn't publish OA.

@MassimoOrtolano thank you. a colleague here commented that maybe it is only for European-level funding, and not single-government funding. Would you agree?

I will ask it as a question on the main site later, as @Wrzlprmft suggested

@Federico With my colleagues, we've recently applied for a national grant here in Italy, and they require just green open access, not the gold one, and this does not require any expense.

ok, found the answer. Apparently there is/was a proposal to make it mandatory from 2020. Some may have already adapted.

@Federico Well, then you can post a question with a self-answer …

I want to write it properly in that case, I'll need a bit of time.

@Federico in the UK some funders require it. Rumor is that for REF 2020 it will be a requirement. I am not sure it is a law, in a legal sense, but generally down to the funders.

thanks. I sincerely don't know how to phrase this anymore. Since it is about something in the future, isn't this a "opinion-based" question?

@Federico I think a question that has the answer of, it is not an EU law yet, but has been proposed to become law in 2020 is really useful. Then in 2020 :) you can edit the answer.