When your research output acknowledges external funding, your funder may be willing to pay any fees associated with open access publishing. Funders who mandate 'gold' open access invariably offer financial support, often through a block grant to the institution, or by reimbursing authors for costs incurred.
UKRI's new Open Access Policy comes into force for journal articles submitted on or after 1st April 2022, and longer form works published on or after 1st Jan 2024. Further information about University of Hull authors' actions required to comply with the policy.
To summarise - Journal articles can be made compliant with the policy through two different routes:
Route 1: Gold open access with a CC-BY licence (CC-BY-ND by exception). UKRI will provide institutions with an Open Access Block Grant to enable the payment of publishers' article processing charges.
Route 2: Green open access, through deposit of the author's accepted manuscript in an institutional or subject-based repository meeting UKRI's technical standards, such as Worktribe. The manuscript must be made open immediately without embargo, with a CC-BY licence (CC-BY-ND by exception).
This may conflict with the publisher's policy on self-archiving, so UKRI-funded authors are directed to include a 'rights retention statement' with their funder acknowledgement when submitting their article to the publisher:
For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence* to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising.
*Where permitted by UKRI, ‘Open Government Licence’ or ‘Creative Commons Attribution No-derivatives (CC BY-ND) licence’ may be stated instead.
Additional criteria applying to both routes:
An open access policy for longer form works, including books and chapters, will come into force for works published on or after 1 Jan 2024:
The British Heart Foundation supports immediate, unrestricted (‘Gold’) open access to primary research articles and non-commissioned reviews and has provided block grant funding to research institutions to support open access fees.
To comply with the BHF Open Access Policy, authors must ensure that every paper acknowledging BHF funding is deposited in Europe PMC, to be made freely available as soon as possible and no later than 6 months after publication. Either the Author's Accepted Manuscript or the published version is permissible.
Many journals will deposit the version of record in Europe PMC immediately on publication, if the author has chosen a Gold OA route.
However, the Block Grant is a fixed sum allocated to each institution on the basis of historic volume of BHF-funded outputs, and availability of funding to fulfil all requests cannot be guaranteed.
In addition, you should deposit your accepted manuscript in Worktribe, so that the University's record of its authors' research output is as complete as possible.
In March 2021 the European Commission launched Open Research Europe (ORE), its own open access publishing platform for scientific articles arising from research funded by Horizon 2020, and soon Horizon Europe.
This is an optional service for EU-funded researchers, to facilitate compliance with open access terms without charging author fees. Submissions are published rapidly as pre-prints for open peer review.
See also RDM Policies for a summary of Horizon criteria for open data.
Horizon 2020
H2020-funded authors “must provide open access to all peer-reviewed scientific publications that stem from project activities, immediately or otherwise within 6/12 months of publication where publisher embargoes apply.”
The European Commission's "Guidelines to the Rules on Open Access" (2017) for Horizon 2020-funded projects do not express a preference for for gold or green as a means of complying with this obligation.
Jisc's Frank Manista has published a helpful summary of Open Access Requirements for Horizon 2020-Funded Projects (April 2019).
Horizon Europe
The UK Research Office advises that Horizon Europe beneficiaries must ensure immediate Open Access to their peer-reviewed scientific publications relating to their results, no later than the publication date and through trusted repositories.
The repository copy must have the latest version of CC-BY licence or equivalent. For monographs and other long-text formats, the licence may exclude commercial uses and derivative works (e.g. CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-ND).
In a change from Horizon 2020 rules, funding will only be made available for publication fees in fully open access venues (also known as '100% gold'). Fees for 'hybrid' journals (journals which have both paywall and OA publishing options) will not be covered. However, authors whose chosen journal is ineligible will be able to comply with Horizon OA criteria by making their accepted manuscript openly available without embargo, or by publishing their findings as a preprint ahead of submission to a journal.
For further details, see Annex 5 of the Annotated Model Grant Agreement for EU Funding Programmes 2021-2027 (pre-draft. 30 Nov 2021).
The NIHR has announced its new Open Access Policy, requiring all peer-reviewed research articles arising from NIHR-funded research studies to be made immediately open access under an open licence. This change will apply to all peer-reviewed articles submitted for publication on or after 1 June 2022.
An email address is provided for queries: openaccess@nihr.ac.uk.
The Plan S open access initiative was published in 2018 by cOAlition S, a consortium of European national and disciplinary research funders, to accelerate scholarly publishers' transition to open access models by setting stringent OA criteria for funded authors. Early members include the World Health Organisation, Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation. UKRI is supportive of Plan S aims.
Researchers with a cOAlition S funder can identify compliant journals using the Journal Checker Tool.
As a member of the cOAlition S consortium of research funders, Wellcome Trust has a new Open Access policy which applies to all journal articles submitted for publication after 1 Jan 2021:
All research articles must be published under a Creative Commons ‘attribution’ licence (CC-BY), and made freely available through PubMed Central and Europe PMC by the official publication date.
In addition, a statement explaining how readers can access any underlying data or software must be published with the research.
Wellcome will provide grant-holders with funding to cover any open access article processing charges incurred, providing the journal is a) fully open access, or b) in transition to full open access through what’s known as a ‘transformative agreement’ with subscribing institutions. The Plan S Journal Checker Tool can be used to establish whether Wellcome will cover any author fees in your chosen journal.
If you wish to publish in a journal which does not offer open access under these terms, you can comply with Wellcome’s policy by depositing your ‘accepted manuscript’ in Worktribe for immediate open access, with a CC-BY licence.
Include Wellcome's Rights Retention Statement with your submitted manuscript, to indicate to your publisher that you will be following Wellcome's terms re open access.
The University of Hull has not adopted an institution-wide policy on covering the costs of APCs; funding may be available at Faculty level.
