Open Access Policy

ASAP requires that all publications adhere to the following:

• Immediate free access: Peer-reviewed, author accepted research must be made freely available immediately upon publication, without any embargo period (zero embargo).
• Unrestricted reuse rights: Articles must be published under the Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY 4.0, or under the CC0 license which does not require attribution, or equivalent. Both licenses permit reuse of the material without restriction.

If other funders of a multi-funded grant (which ASAP also partially supports) are concerned about adhering to our policy, ASAP will engage in discussion with the other funder(s) to understand their concerns. Contact us at [email protected] to initiate discussion. Grantee compliance with our OA policies will be monitored vigilantly so we urge such discussion prior to publication when there are contravening circumstances. Below are details on how to comply with our requirements.

How to ensure immediate free access?

This guidance is designed to permit publication in any journal of choice while complying with our requirements of immediate free access to and unrestricted use of your original research publication.

• Route 1 (preferred): Publish in a gold or hybrid journal that offers immediate OA of the final edited version of the journal article (known as the version of record [VoR]) and accepts a CC BY or equivalent license. Most gold and hybrid journals also accept the CC BY license. If they do not, it will be necessary to follow Route 2.
  • Gold journals provide immediate OA for all articles.
  • Hybrid journals provide OA for an additional fee on some articles but do not allow all their articles to be freely accessible.
• Route 2 (discouraged): Publish in a subscription-only journal and deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM; the version following peer review that is accepted by the journal) in Pubmed Central under a CC BY license. Under this option (known as the “green” option), the AAM must be available to the public immediately upon the journal’s publication of the VoR (the final citable publication). Note that a few hybrid journals do not accept the CC BY license, in which case you’ll need to follow this route. Route 2 is less desirable because the AAM does not reflect copyedited revisions, updates, or corrections to the paper. However, the AAM can be linked to the VoR for those who wish to read or cite the canonical version. If you are considering this route, please email [email protected] to discuss why Route 1 is not possible.

Note, that in our funding considerations, we will consider the intrinsic merit of the work, not the title or journal impact factor (JIF) of the journal or publisher. This is in line with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), of which we are a signatory.

ASAP support: coverage of reasonable Article Processing Charges (APCs)

To assist with compliance, ASAP will pay reasonable Article Processing Charges (APCs) for open access research articles and reviews. ASAP works with our implementation partner, The Michael J Fox Foundation (MJFF), to provide coverage when applicable for APCs. To apply for coverage, grantees can complete an online form.  When the request is submitted, you will receive an email from the ASAP team, through MJFF, confirming receipt. The ASAP team will review your request within 3-4 business days and notify you via email of the decision regarding the request. We may reach out for additional information needed to facilitate the review. The timeline for review may extend depending on your response time and the quality of additional information provided. Once you’ve received a positive decision on your request, you can forward to the ASAP team the notification from the publisher that payment is due upon final editorial acceptance of the paper. This will probably include a link to request a payment invoice. We can then begin the process of requesting a payment invoice from the publisher to MJFF and arrange for payment directly to them on your behalf. As a final step, we will send you a copy of the confirmation of the payment we received from the publisher.

How to ensure appropriate CC license for unrestricted reuse rights?

For any publication, you must apply a Creative Commons (CC) Attribution license or public domain license to all Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) arising from submissions to peer-reviewed journals that report original research. Below are the types of licenses that are compliant with ASAP’s open access requirement.

• CC BY 4.0 is the default license required for all research papers. The license ensures that you receive attribution for the work (intellectual ownership) but allows your work to be freely shared (redistributed in any medium or format or adapted for future purposes).
• CC0 license is applied to authors employed by the government, or for other content in the public domain. Under this license, no attribution is required.
• CC BY-ND can be applied in exceptional cases. Under a CC BY-ND license, no derivatives of the original content are permitted (i.e., the content remains unchanged). In these cases, you must email [email protected]  prior to publication acceptance to explain the reasons for the exception. We will consider on a case-by-case basis.

In the rare event that there is disagreement with the publisher regarding the licensing requirement and immediate online access requirement, contact ASAP at [email protected] to assist. To ensure appropriate licensing, you must:

• Include language that your submission carries a CC BY public copyright license (or CC0, CC BY-ND if appropriate) in the acknowledgement section of your submitted manuscript (to both the preprint server and the publisher). See “Acknowledgements” in Requirement 4 for required language.
• Determine whether the journal will include the CC BY (or CC0, CC BY-ND) license in the published VoR (the final version of record published by the journal). Journals typically list the license terms of an article under a rights and permissions or a copyright tab. If you cannot find this information, you can also send an email to the publisher.
  • If the journal has the appropriate licensing, and the article is being published in an open access journal (gold or hybrid), do nothing. The journal will submit your article to PubMed Central (PMC) or Europe PMC upon publication.
  • If the journal does not have the appropriate licensing, and/or if the journal is subscription-only, submit the AAM to PubMed Central so that it appears at the same time the VoR is published.

Preprints, which are complete drafts of manuscripts yet to be formally peer reviewed, must be submitted to a public preprint server – such as bioRxiv or medRxiv – upon submission to a journal, or sooner. Preprint manuscripts must be identical to the version submitted for publication, linking to research outputs, and carrying the appropriate CC license as described above.

Upon publication of the peer-reviewed article, the preprint must link to it. This is usually done automatically by bioRxiv or medRxiv when the final publication appears in most journals if the Title of the article remains unchanged. Note that if you have published in a subscription journal that does not have open access options, then the preprint would link to the author-accepted manuscript which carries the CC BY or equivalent license posted in PubMed Central.

In addition to ensuring open access to preprints and published manuscripts, ASAP’s open access policy requires that funded researchers maximize the availability of research data and code underlying research findings.

At a minimum, the data that support research papers must be made available to other researchers in recognized community repositories at the time of preprint and manuscript submission, as well as any original software that is required to view datasets or to replicate analyses.

Underlying data encompass all primary data, associated metadata (with the exception of protected health information [PHI] or electronic protected health information[(ePHI]), and any additional relevant data necessary to understand, assess, and replicate the reported study findings. Note that data could include software, datasets, protocols, tools, and reagents used. This is critical to allow others to verify, reproduce, and reuse data in new ways. In addition, careful recording and management of data and code offer provenance and preservation for future inquiries.

These policies are aligned with existing industry best practices, including data availability policies required by several publishers.

Please note that ASAP endorses the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship that were published in Scientific Data in 2016. These guidelines are intended to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets.

The core requirements of ASAP’s policies and the FAIR principles are:

1. All relevant dataset files are described by adequate metadata.
2. All datasets are assigned a globally unique and persistent identifier that is included in the core metadata.
3. The persistent identifier and adequate metadata are registered or indexed in a reliable, searchable resource.
4. Ensure that the ASAP Acknowledgements are included in the repository record.

Repository selection for underlying data and software

ASAP will provide a list of preferred data repositories for which all funded work should be deposited, and we will work with teams to identify the appropriate platforms. Please note that any data repository of your choosing must adhere to the following:

• Enable immediate open access to the underlying data upon posting of your preprint and submission of your manuscript to a journal;
• Allow reuse with licensing no more restrictive than Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0);
• Assign your dataset with a persistent and unique identifier, such as a DOI (digital object identifier) to facilitate linking and citation;
• Provide long-term storage and preservation, such as those that meet the ISO’s trustworthy digital repository standards.

For questions about recommended repositories, please email [email protected] or [email protected].

Repositories for protocols, lab resources, and software

Protocols: Experimental protocols that are employed in ASAP-funded research must be made publicly available (and updated as needed) through a protocol sharing service such as protocols.io. ASAP will provide support to grantees in using the protocols.io platform. Sharing and discussing scientific methods is crucial to achieving credible, reproducible experimental research.

Software: Software, including algorithms, scripts, and other code-based research outputs, must be made available through code repositories like GitHub and assigned a DOI. If it is difficult or impossible to assign a DOI through the code repository, Zenodo can also assign a DOI to code hosted elsewhere.

Lab Resources: All tools or reagents that are funded by ASAP and/or result from ASAP-awarded projects must be made readily available to the community and citable as a means of supporting reproducibility and to enable further research. For questions about recommended repositories, please email [email protected]. For assistance with citing lab resource tools, take a look at the Resource Identification Portal that aggregates information from multiple repositories and provides identifiers for citation in publications. This requirement applies to cell lines, transgenic models, plasmids/clones, antibodies, and other reagents.

All publications resulting from partial or full support by ASAP — either during the award, or after the funding period has ended — must be credited with reference to GP2.

Acknowledgements

The following language must be included in the acknowledgements section of the publication:

“Data used in the preparation of this article were obtained from Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2). GP2 is funded by the Aligning Science Against Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative and implemented by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (https://gp2.org). For a complete list of GP2 members see https://gp2.org.”

Authorship

Researchers may use GP2 data for any projects/analyses of interest that are in compliance with the GP2 data use agreement. There will be three types of GP2 publications:

Consortium-led, GP2-focused papers

1. On papers authored by the GP2 Steering Committee or Working Groups and primarily based on the GP2 collaborative data set, all GP2 members will be co-authors and the consortium name (Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2) Consortium) will be placed after the senior authors (depending on journal guidelines). All named authors should see, comment, and agree to the submission of the paper prior to submission. Authors can actively opt out from inclusion in the authorship list and any co-authors who do not respond within two weeks to requests to comment on a manuscript or to provide information requested by journals can be removed from the author line to be placed in the Acknowledgement section.

Papers incorporating GP2 data in a secondary manner

1. For analyses where the individual genotype data from the GP2 database are used in a secondary manner (e.g., to replicate results from non-consortium data or gene/locus focused manuscript), members of the primary analysis and writing groups are named authors. All others are listed under the consortium name, which is included in the authorship list between first and last authors. The authors listed under the consortium name will appear and be searchable in PubMed once fully processed by PubMed. All named and footnoted authors should see, comment and agree to the submission of the paper prior to submission. Authors can actively opt out from inclusion in the authorship list, and any co-authors who do not respond within two weeks to requests to comment on a manuscript.

External Papers

1. The consortium name may not appear on the author line for publications authored by non-consortium members. For these publications, the consortium members will also not be listed in PubMed.

Unusual Situations

It is expected that the aforementioned policies will cover the majority of users of GP2 data. GP2 anticipates that investigators will follow these guidelines in good faith and that most analyses will be of high quality. However, GP2 also anticipates the possibility of some unusual circumstances.

Egregiously Poor Manuscripts

If review by the GP2 Steering Committee of a proposed manuscript reveals that it is egregiously poor in terms of language, scientific question, analytical methods, writing, or clarity, the GP2 Steering Committee can recommend to the authors that it not be submitted without significant revision. If the authors choose to submit the manuscript anyway, the GP2 Steering Committee will have three options: 1) request that the group authorship credit be withheld; 2) request that the authors publish a statement to the effect that, while GP2 data were used, the GP2 study did not find the manuscript of sufficient merit to warrant submission for publication; 3) revocation of privileges to use GP2 data in the future.

Failure to Follow GP2 Data Use Agreement

If users inadvertently violate the GP2 data use agreement, it is likely that they will self-correct as infractions are discovered. If users willfully violate the agreements, the sole sanction available to GP2 will be to revoke access to the GP2 data.

Fraudulent Use of Data

Open access using only online registration raises the possibility that individuals could obtain access to data under false pretenses. Should the GP2 Steering Committee discover an attempt to publish using GP2 data obtained fraudulently, the user will be sanctioned through communication from the GP2 Steering Committee to the researcher or their supervisors, persons/committees responsible for oversight, and/or governing bodies. As soon as the GP2 Steering Committee becomes aware of any breach of the data use agreement, immediate steps will be taken to cure the breach or end the violation. This may include discontinuing the user’s data access and/or reporting the violation to any relevant individual/organization.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation, ASAP, and the GP2 Steering Committee maintain the right to modify terms of this agreement, and may do so by posting notice of such modifications on this page. Any modification made is effective immediately upon posting the modification (unless otherwise stated). You should visit this page periodically to review the current use agreement terms.