The new policy applies to peer-reviewed research articles, including reviews and conference papers, submitted for publication from 1st April 2022 in either a journal, conference proceedings with a ISSN or publishing platform.
Preprints are not in scope of the policy, however UKRI encourages the use of preprints to facilitate open research practices (for more information, see MRC policy on Preprints and BBSRC policy on preprints).
When must your research output be made open access?
UKRI requires immediate open access upon publication either by:
- Route 1: publish in a journal or publishing platform which makes the version of record immediately open access via its website. An article processing charge (APC) may be required.
- Licence: articles must be published under a CC BY licence or where Crown Copyright requires, an Open Government Licence (OGL). Authors may apply to UKRI for permission to publish under the Creative Commons Attribution – No Derivatives CC BY-ND licence as an exception.
- Route 2: publish in a subscription journal and deposit the author accepted manuscript (AM) in an institutional or subject repository upon publication.
- The AM must be released upon official publication date (no embargo allowed!!)
- Licence: AM must have a CC BY licence, or other licence permitted by UKRI as above.
- To make your intentions clear to the publisher, submissions must include the following text in the funding acknowledgement section of the manuscript and any cover letter/note accompanying the submission: ‘For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence (where permitted by UKRI, ‘Open Government Licence’ or ‘Creative Commons Attribution No-derivatives (CC BY-ND) licence’ may be stated instead) to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising’.
- It is recommended that you check the publisher self-archiving policies before submission, should the publisher fail to accept these terms UKRI advise that you choose another publication that offers a compliant route - contact openresearch@abdn.ac.uk for advice.
- It is good practice to add this statement to all submissions; in the event that your submission is not accepted by your first choice of publication then the intentions are clear to any forwarding publication. The University of Aberdeen Research Publications Policy supports Rights Retention.
For either open access route, biomedical research articles that acknowledge MRC or BBSRC funding are required to be archived in Europe PubMed Central, in accordance with MRC’s Additional Terms and Conditions and BBSRC’s Safeguarding Good Research Policy.
It is recommended that researchers use a standard format to acknowledge their funders e.g. "This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number xxxx]." or for multiple funders "This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the Natural Environment Research Council [grant number zzzz]; and the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number aaaa]."
Data access statement
UKRI requires in-scope research articles to include a Data Access Statement, even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible. Further information about writing a Data Access Statement is provided on the UKRI Good Research Resource Hub.
Applying to UKRI for permission to publish under the CC BY-ND licence as an exception
Authors may apply to UKRI for an exception to use the CC BY-ND Creative Commons licence. Fill in the form here. You must provide a statement (200 words max) explaining the research-specific reason why there is a need to apply this licence; UKRI ask that you give due consideration to the restrictions that using this licence will have on the reuse and sharing of publicly funded research before you apply.
Open Access Funding
UKRI provide a block grant to support compliance with the open access policy for research articles. Article Processing Charges (APCs) will not be paid for hybrid (subscription) journals, only APCs in fully open access journals are eligible. Funds are limited, contact the Open Research Team for advice before committing to an APC. Funding for long-form publications is separate and administered by UKRI.
The University has many open access publisher agreements which allow compliant open access publishing in participating hybrid journals.
Useful links
- Policy: https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy/
- Explanation of policy changes: https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy-explanation-of-policy-changes/
- Non-derivative licence exception: No-derivatives licence exception – UKRI