Austria

The Austrian Academy of Sciences Press operates the institutional repository of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The press is both a publishing house and an institutional repository. Publications by scientists of the Austrian Academy are uploaded as far as external publishers involved give the institutional repository permission to do so. The Austrian Academy only uploads publications to the repository on the basis of a general agreement that has to be signed by the director of the institute before the upload to the repository starts. The Austrian Academy of Sciences Press developed a user guide (available in German) at http://www.epub.oeaw.ac.at/dokumentation. The contact person is Herwig Stoeger, herwig.stoeger@oeaw.ac.at.

The central body in Austria for the funding of basic research is the Austrian Science Fund Organisation (FWF). The FWF is a signatory of the Berlin Declaration and committed to the support and promotion of open access to scientific publications. Therefore the FWF expects the results of research it supports to be made publicly available free of charge. Researchers participating in FWF projects should attempt, as far as possible, to secure lasting and non-exclusive rights for the electronic publication of their results, for the purpose of non-profit-oriented utilisation in their contracts with publishing houses. If there is an embargo period, this period should last no longer than six to twelve months. The FWF reimburses the publication costs.

If the results of projects are published in a conventional peer-reviewed journal, an application for reimbursement of costs associated with the submission of scientific articles to refereed Open access journals may be sent to the FWF. The FWF has a website with information about open access. There is a small paragraph regarding copyright aspects; it refers to the Creative Commons website and the RoMEO e-prints site. The website also points to the Open access publishing models of Blackwell, Oxford University Press and Springer.

The URL of the web site is http://www.fwf.ac.at/en/public_relations/oai/ index/html.

Contact person is dr. Falk Reckling, falk.reckling@fwf.ac.at.

Belgium

The department of research of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) is in charge of the legal framework for the relationship author-institution regarding intellectual property rights.