New UKRI Open Access policy

UKRI's Open Access Policy applies to:

• Peer-reviewed research articles, including reviews and conference papers, that are accepted for final publication in either a journal, conference proceeding with an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), or publishing platform (e.g. F1000Research) submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022
• Monographs, book chapters and edited collections published on or after 1 January 2024

• The new requirements on articles:  Open Access immediately upon publication and more
  • Accepted Author Manuscript (AAM) must be freely available to view and download in an institutional or subject repository at the time of final publication.
  • A publisher-requested delay or ‘embargo period’ between publication of the Version of Record and open access of the deposited version is not permitted.
  • AAM must have a CC BY licence applied (with some permitted exceptions for use of CC BY ND).
  • UKRI will not fund open access for outputs in subscription (hybrid) journals except through transformative agreements.
  • A Data Access Statement is mandatory, even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible.
  • MRC and BBSRC biomedical research articles that acknowledge UKRI funding must be archived in Europe PubMed Central.
• The new requirements on books and book chapters:  Open Access within 12 months of publication
  • Either published as an OA item or by deposit of Author Accepted Manuscript within a maximum of 12 months of publication.
  • A Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence is preferred but other CC licences are permitted.
  • Books may include third-party materials (such as images, photographs, diagrams or maps) which are subject to a more restrictive licence.
  • UKRI recognises there may be rare instances where meeting open access requirements for long-form publications may not be possible. Therefore, the following exemptions may apply:
    • where a contract has been signed between an author and publisher before 1st January 2024 that prevents adherence to the policy.
    • where the only appropriate publisher, after liaison and consideration, is unable to offer an open access option that complies with UKRI’s policy.
    • where a monograph, book chapter or edited collection is the outcome of a UKRI Training Grant. Where possible, UKRI expects Research Organisations to support researchers to make such outputs open access; however, it recognises that publication may occur sometime beyond the lifetime of a training grant.