Open Access in MSC

I recently had an odd experience with regard to the possibility — or rather impossibility — to use the Research and Training contribution of my Marie Curie fellowship for the payment of Open Access fees. Before my current IEF, I was fellow in a programme of the COFUND modality. At the end of the COFUND fellowship, I submitted a paper that was eventually published 18 months later. From my experience, this is an average period for academic journals.

I was intending to make the article Open Access, and since the previous COFUND had already ended much before the publication and even the acceptance of the article, I intended to use funds from the Research and Training contribution of my current IEF. Yet my Project Officer told me that the Open Access fee for this article is not an eligible cost, since the R&T contribution can ONLY be used for making Open Access the results produced under the same project.

Except from outgoing fellows, the duration of MSC fellowships cannot be longer than 24 months. So the upshot of the EU’s policy is that OA is actually only possible for results produced at the very beginning of a Marie Curie Project. I was wondering how fellows funded with an OA mandate under H2020 are dealing with this issue — how are they supposed to pay OA fees? In addition, I think that the promotion of freely accessible research results should be of central concern to the EU — even more if the EU itself contributes public funds as in my particular case. I asked my Project Officer to alert to this problem within the REA, but anyway, I am also interested to hear if any other members in this forum have also been affected by the same problem.