These policies require that ILRI staff, consultants and others receiving funds through ILRI make every effort to publish their information products (articles, books, reports, posters, etc..) and data openly.
For products ILRI produces itself, the workflows are well-established and publications and videos that pass through ILRI communications staff are automatically made open and public. The most challenging types of information product to make open are journal articles and books/chapters published externally. Normally:
- Authors can choose to publish in an open access journal (which require the author to pay an "article processing charge"). These charges need to be budgeted into project proposals (at an average of USD 3,000 per article)
- Authors can also deposit journal articles in an institutional repository (CGSpace for ILRI). This is normally either a preprint, or the peer-reviewed postprint – either the author's refereed, revised final draft or the publisher's version of record.
Regarding journals, it is very important that authors watch out for and avoid predatory publishers who claim to be legitimate but are actually not offering real scientific publishing. See a service that lists reputable open access journals.
More information and guidance is available from the CGIAR open access and open data support pack.
