Open Access Australasia warmly welcomes the revised Australian Research Council’s Open Access Policy effective 1 July 2026. This update reflects careful consideration of community consultation, and sets a strong benchmark for Australian open scholarship.
The policy establishes clear, tiered timelines that recognise diverse publishing practices while advancing openness. It mandates immediate open access with CC BY licensing for peer‑reviewed journal articles and conference papers (removing the prior 12‑month embargo). While acknowledging global book‑publishing challenges, it requires monographs, edited volumes, book chapters, and research reports to be openly accessible within 12 months with a strong preference for CC BY. It also strongly encourages open access for creative works wherever feasible notwithstanding their unique rights, ownership, and dissemination complexities.
Metadata
All outputs must deposit rich metadata in institutional repositories within 3 months, supporting infrastructure discoverability even where full open access takes longer. These requirements align with the ARC’s PID Action Plan by mandating ORCIDs, DOIs, ARC Grant DOIs, and other available PIDs, while specified fields—such as access status, licence, publisher, and rich descriptions—enable robust national tracking of research activity for all outputs universally.
Rights Retention
“For the purposes of compliance with the funder’s open access policy, the author has applied a CC BY licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.”
The revised policy now aligns with the NHMRC and MRFF Open Science Policy through this shared rights retention language. The RR statement is mandated pre-submission, improving clarity for researchers navigating publisher agreements. While this represents a strong step forward, its effectiveness hinges on publisher acceptance as many continue to reject or ignore such notices when issuing standard copyright transfer agreements post-acceptance.
Compliance pathways
The policy replaces broad, non-specific language from previous versions with clearly defined compliance pathways. It simplifies researcher choices by specifying Route One (Version of Record made open access by publishers) and Route Two (Author Accepted Manuscript deposited in repositories) as the exclusive options. While ARC demonstrates increased support for the repository pathway through this emphasis, repositories may face additional workload from mandatory metadata provision within three months.
It is also important to note that the responsibility for ensuring compliance with the policy seems to fall on the administering organisation. This underlines the importance of rights retention at the institutional level and the urgent need to progress the agenda around this to underpin compliance.
Alignment with NHMRC
The new ARC Open Access Policy achieves alignment with the NHMRC and MRFF Open Science Policy through identical immediate open access requirements, shared rights retention language, CC BY licensing, and dual compliance routes. This will simplify workflows for dual-funded researchers who previously navigated divergent timelines and expectations across Australia’s largest research funders.
Provision for IDS&G and ICIP
Section 4.5 represents an explicit attempt to integrate Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance (IDS&G) principles into open access policy to date. Researchers “must undertake” actions “such as”:
- Requires alignment with all five of the Maiam Nayri Wingara principles for research outputs involving First Nations communities.
- Use of Traditional Knowledge Notices and Traditional Knowledge Labels where possible in all research output metadata. While the use of Notices does not seem to give communities initial control over their cultural materials before open access publication (the TK notice flags the content pending community review, whereas the output could be immediately open), it forms part of the policy’s broader provisions, representing progress toward community authority in research outputs.
- Adopting a more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives (CC BY-ND) licensing as a cultural safeguard, overriding the standard CC BY requirement.
- Requires formal research agreements covering ownership, access, distribution, and reuse of outputs, formalising community rights before publication decisions are made. It is unclear what mechanisms are in place to verify these agreements.
- Recommends Indigenous-led governance arrangements (including advisory groups), capacity building, and evaluation mechanisms.
The new policy takes a meaningful step toward integrating Indigenous Data Sovereignty into open access requirements. Comparable provisions could now also be integrated into the ARC Research Data Framework to ensure comprehensive protection across the full research lifecycle from data to publications. This step forward may, however, create unintended administrative burdens for Indigenous researchers who, while meeting these comprehensive protocols, still face standard reporting requirements (see 4.2 Open Access Requirements).
In Conclusion
OAA welcomes this progressive updated policy as a vital step toward a more equitable open scholarship ecosystem, particularly through the inclusion of Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance provisions. We note that ensuring compliance requires urgent attention to institutional rights retention so authors can meet immediate open access and CC BY requirements. Requiring rich metadata and PIDs enables the interoperability and discoverability essential for robust open infrastructure. We look forward to partnering with the ARC to support their implementation and advance this shared vision.
ARC’s updated Open Access Policy can be downloaded here
For more information consider attending the ARC Open Access Policy 2026 update to be held at 11am AEST on May 20 2026. Register here
