On September 5th 2018, the Belgian Official Journal published an Open Access provision in the Belgian law. This law gives authors the right to make scholarly publications available in Open Access with a maximum embargo period of  6 months for Science Technology and Medicine (STM) and 12 months for Social Science & Humanities (SSH), if the publication is a result of research funded for at least 50% by public funds.

Your rights as an author

• 6 or 12 months embargo

The authors have the right to make the accepted version available to the public (i.e. share it in OA) after an embargo of 6 (STEM) or 12 (HSS) months after the date of publication, provided that the source of the first edition is mentioned.

• Compelling

The new regulation prevails over any agreement signed with a publisher of a journal. The publisher cannot oppose this right, for example via a clause in the publishing contract. Such a clause is not enforceable.

• Retroactive

The law can be applied retroactively, which means the author can decide to open up old articles.

What does this mean concretely?

• The law allows the author to make his/her work available in Open Access, but does not require the author to do so. The author has complete freedom.
• The publisher cannot oppose this right, for example via a clause in the publishing contract. Such a clause is not enforceable.
• Only scholarly articles are subject to the law, other publications such as books, chapters, conference proceedings in books, are not.
• Only the final peer reviewed manuscript can be used. This is the version after peer review, but not in the layout of the publisher. The publisher’s version can only be used if the publisher agrees.
• The law applies to everyone with a link to Belgium. E.g. authors with the Belgian nationality, working at a Belgian institution or whose research has been funded by a Belgian funder.
• The author has the right to make the scholarly article available to the public free of charge in open access, after the embargo period.
• The law can be applied retroactively, which means the author can decide to open up old articles.

Link policy UGent

The application of the Open Access paragraph has been included in Ghent University's policy on scholarly publishing.