The Australian Research Council (ARC) announces as of July 2026, journal articles and peer-reviewed conference papers based on its grants must be open access from pub date.
The present requirement is for content to be free to read within 12 months; and this term will still apply to monographs, edited volumes, book chapters and “research reports.”
The new policy also strengthens the previous get-out clause requiring reasons to be given when OA deadline(s) were not met, examples were “legal or contractual obligations.”
But from July, final project reports to the ARC must provide a justification of why OA did not occur, when and how it will and who will make it happen. However, the policy is silent on outcomes if content continues unpublished.
For-profit publishers are still protected under the new policy, with publication permitted in journals that set “open access publishing charges.” The ARC can continue to pick these up, given “publication and dissemination costs can be an eligible expense across ARC schemes.”
The ARC is catching up with the National Health and Medical Research Council, which has required since 2022 open access on publication for all peer reviewed papers it funds.
But while article processing charges can be met from NHMRC funding, they cannot come from core grants. As of February the NHMRC also accepts on-line preprint as publication.
The ARC’s change brings it more into line with agreements struck between ANZ university libraries and four, so far, of the big five commercial publishers. These permit on-publication OA for papers by researchers at ANZ universities, as part of each institutions subscription agreements with a publisher.
However, the deals are not believed to necessarily make all content OA.