Publishing in line with NCN

On 26 June 2025, the National Science Centre announced some changes to the rules for open publishing. These changes were presented in the announcement and included in the NCN Director's Order No. 39/2025. The changes apply to ongoing and future projects. 

Introduced changes: 

• reports for projects, including annual and final ones, may include publications in the traditional (hybrid, closed) model. These reports do not have to include the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) or preprint in repository; 
• open access publications may be covered by any Creative Commons or other open licence that complies with open access principles. The Centre recommends the use of CC BY 4.0; 
• the lack of publication in open access will not affect the evaluation of the annual or final report and the clearance of the project; 
• open access publishing costs (Article Processing Charges, or APCs) in hybrid journals will be eligible for open access indirect funding (up to 2% of direct costs) and other indirect costs. Three equivalent ways of publishing are kept, with APC costs allowed for all of them and any Creative Commons or similar licence. 

NCN does not recommend paying APC costs for papers published under pathway 2, i.e. in subscription or hybrid journals, where an AAM or preprint version can be made freely available in the repository. 

Monographs, chapters in books and peer-reviewed works collected in open access 

For monographs, chapters in books and peer-reviewed collected works, two open access models are recommended: 

• Gold Open Access - a work immediately available online free of charge to the user; 
• Green Open Access - making a published manuscript (e.g. Author Accepted Manuscript, AAM or preprint) available in an open repository by the author. 

The costs of publishing monographs in open access, the so-called Book Processing Charges (BPC), can be covered by direct costs after a positive evaluation by NCN. From the SONATA BIS 14 and MAESTRO 16 competitions (competition announcement of 17 June 2024) onwards, these costs are considered ineligible. 

International competitions 

POLONEZ BIS, CHANSE networks, CHIST-ERA: the rules for open access publishing do not change (Order No. 38/2020); 

• ForestValue2, Luke, Quantera III and T-AP: the flexible NCN rules introduced on 26 June 2025 apply, 
• Biodiversa+: Horizon Europe rules apply 

Sharing research data

The associated data (core dataset) with published articles (for both open access and closed model publications) must be: 

• reliably documented in a manner that satisfies the principles of machine- or manual searchability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (in accordance with FAIR principles) 
• made available in an open repository where possible under the terms of a Creative Commons CC0 or CC BY 4.0 or other licence that provides the same level of openness and re-usability of the data. 

It is allowed to restrict the sharing of data in certain situations: 

• protection of personal data; 
• trade secrets or industrial property;
• national security; 
• intellectual property rights limiting the possibility of sharing. 

Although publishing in Open Access is no longer mandatory, National Science Center continues to recommend this model to increase the visibility and accessibility of research results, to enable greater use of publicly funded knowledge and to fulfil the social mission of science. 

* NCN does not recommend paying APC costs for manuscripts published under pathway 2, i.e. in subscription or hybrid journals, where the AAM or preprint version can be made available free of charge in the repository

• AAM  (Author Accepted Manuscript) –  the final version of a manuscript, including any changes introduced after peer review, created by the author and accepted for publication in a journal. Also known as: postprint.
• Preprint - a version of an article that precedes peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, other names include submitted version, AOM (Author's Original Manuscript), SMUR (Submitted Manuscript Under Review) 
• VoR (Version of Record) – a version of the manuscript published in a journal with the fonts and graphics consistent with its visual identity system. Also known as: published version or publisher’s PDF
• Persistent Identifier (PID) - is a persistent identifier, a sequence of characters that uniquely and permanently identifies an object to which it is linked (a commonly used persistent identifier is e.g. DOI).
• APC (Article Processing Charges) –  costs of publishing an article in an open access journal 
• CC BY 4.0 – Attribution 4.0 International
• CC BY ND – Attribution-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• CC BY SA 4.0 – Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
• Transformational journal - is a hybrid journal committed to becoming a full open access journal 
• Transformational agreement - allows researchers affiliated with an institution to publish papers in open access at no additional cost to the author. List of Polish transformational agreements 

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Compiled on the basis of: Instrukcja: otwarty dostęp do publikacji (2024). Narodowe Centrum Nauki. Wersja 2.0 oraz  Polityki otwartego dostępu do publikacji naukowych NCN