HFSP is a voluntary international effort by countries committed to promoting frontier research in the life sciences. The scientific scope of the Program is to support innovative basic research into fundamental biological problems with emphasis on novel and interdisciplinary approaches that involve scientific exchanges across national and disciplinary boundaries. Dependent on the public funds of our members, it is our statutory mandate “to make the fullest possible utilization of the research results for the benefit of all humankind.” Therefore HFSP wants to share the results of its funded projects in the broadest possible way - not just among researchers but also with other sectors and the general public. To improve access to results originating from HFSP funded research the following statement on open access publishing was approved by the HFSPO Board of Trustees at its meeting in March 2014.

The Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) is an international program of research support. The members of the HFSP, the so-called Management Supporting Parties (MSPs), are the governments of the following countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the European Union, which contributes on behalf of the non-G7 EU members.

The mission of the HFSP is to promote, through international cooperation, basic research focused on the elucidation of the sophisticated and complex mechanisms of living organisms at all levels of complexity: from individual biomolecules up to interactions between organisms.

HFSP expects that scientists receiving financial support from the Program disseminate their findings in international, high-quality peer review journals and that publications arising from HFSP funded projects are made freely available as soon as possible after publication and licensed in ways which allow others to build upon and re-use this content. Therefore HFSP funded scientists are encouraged to maximize the dissemination of their research output by opting to publish their research articles using the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY¹ to guarantee unrestricted open access as early as possible after acceptance of a manuscript.

Awardees are free to choose to make the article open-access by 1) publishing in an open-access journal, 2) posting to an online repository, or 3) paying an open access fee to a hybrid journal.

In order to meet the above criteria, HFSP awardees can claim open access fees for publications arising from HFSP projects as an eligible expense of the award. Therefore awardees may pay these charges from the research portion of their HFSP funds.

The above statement applies to all peer-reviewed research articles including invited review articles that are published in journals or proceedings volumes and that acknowledge financial support from the HFSP.