Funders’ requirements

Although the submission to REF 2021 is now complete, you must continue to meet the requirements of the REF 2021 Open Access Policy for future assessment exercises, until further notice.

• The policy applies to journal articles and conference proceedings (published with an ISSN)
• The author’s accepted manuscript needs to be deposited in an Open Access repository as soon as the paper is accepted for publication, and no later than 90 days from acceptance
• Deposited manuscripts must be publicly available within 12 months (REF panels A and B) or 24 months (REF panels C and D)
• Articles published for Open Access meet the policy requirements.

Read the full guidance on the REF 2021 website and learn more on making your publications Open Access.

The UKRI Open Access Policy policy applies to:

• peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022
• monographs, book chapters and edited collections published on or after 1 January 2024.

With respect to research articles, the policy requires you to:

• Publish the paper Open Access, making it available immediately at the time of online publication with a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY)

         OR

• Make the accepted manuscript of the paper available in an Open Access repository, immediately on publication, with a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY)

You are also required to:

• Acknowledge the funders that supported the research
• Include a data access statement, even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible. 

What has changed from the previous UKRI policy?

The policy has introduced changes related to how the UKRI Open Access block fund may (or may not) be used to support OA publishing.

The policy also indicates what you need to do to comply with immediate OA via the repository.

These changes are summarised below.

A new Open Access policy for Monographs, Book chapters and edited collections will come into effect on the 1st of January 2024.

The policy will apply to monographs, book chapters, or edited collections that need to acknowledge funding from UKRI or any of its councils and will be published under 7 years after the formal end of a UKRI funded project or whilst the project is still ongoing. Trade books are also in scope of the policy where it is the only output from UKRI-funded research.

UKRI has announced that there will be a 'bedding-in' period from the 1st of January 2024 until the 30th of September 2024 where they will not be monitoring for compliance or taking related actions, although authors will still be expected to comply with the policy during this period.

Exceptions:

1. If a longform publication acknowledges a UKRI grant that ended 7 years or more before the publication date
2. If the only appropriate publisher for your work does not provide a compliant open access option. UKRI expects this to be rare, and only after significant consideration of options and liaison with the publisher.
3. If the sole funding acknowledgement is for a UKRI ‘training grant’ (eg PhD stipend).
4. If permissions for third party material cannot be obtained and there is no suitable alternative which enables open access publication.
5. Trade books are exempt from the policy, except in cases where they are the sole output of UKRI funded research. The classification of a book as a ‘trade book’ will be at the discretion of author and publisher.
6. Scholarly editions, exhibition catalogues, scholarly illustrated catalogues, textbooks and all types of fictional work are exempt from the policy.
7. If a contract has been signed between author and publisher before 1 January 2024 which prevents adherence to the policy (however, UKRI strongly encourages authors to think about open access options in advance of the policy start date).

The core requirements of the policy are:

• Final Version of Record or Author’s Accepted Manuscript must be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publisher’s website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication.
• The open access version of the publication must have a Creative Commons licence, with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence preferred. An Open Government licence is also permitted. (This requirement does not apply to third party materials).
• images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content should be included in the open access version, where possible.

Will UKRI pay for Open Access charges?

From January 2024 UKRI will dedicate approximately £3.5 million to a ring-fenced fund to support open access monograph publishing. The fund will be held centrally by UKRI, and authors will be able to apply to it to cover open access charges for in-scope books and chapters (full costing available here). Initial ("stage 1") applications will be to check whether an output is eligible for support and should therefore be made at an early stage of the process (eg. before a contract has been signed if possible). Applications must be made by the Library open access team on the researcher's behalf.

It is important that you ask publishers about charges early on in your conversations with them, letting them know you are UKRI funded and the details of the open access requirement.

You can contact the Library Open Research team (openresearch@surrey.ac.uk) to ask any questions. To ask us to make a Stage 1 application to UKRI on your behalf, please fill in this form. Please do not use the form available on the UKRI open access policy website, as this is for the use of designated administrative staff only.

If you are no longer affiliated to the University of Surrey, and not based at another UK research institution, please contact UKRI directly at openresearch@ukri.org. 

A new policy applies for research articles submitted from 1 January 2021.

Research articles funded by the Wellcome Trust must be:

• Made freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC by the official publication date
• Made available under a Creative Commons attribution licence (CC-BY), unless the funder has agreed to an exception of a CC BY-ND licence.

UKRI provides a block fund to Surrey to cover Open Access costs. You do not need to write the costs into their bids. For other funders, you need to include publication costs in the grant application. These funders include the European Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

Consider the staff involved in and responsible for all research data management activities, from day-to-day organisation to the final preparations for sharing and preservation. Activities to consider here include:

• Managing, formatting and documenting the data
• Cleaning, validating, de-identifying, transcribing
• Creating metadata
• Training on data management, sharing, and preservation
• Documenting and preparing data for sharing and preservation
• Uploading and sharing data to data repositories.

It may be necessary to factor in costs of additional staff or a percentage of a staff member’s time to undertake some or all of these functions.

Any software and/or hardware you will need to undertake your project’s management activities, particularly for enabling data to be shared and preserved more easily.

If your project will require more than 1TB of storage contact IT Services (itservicedesk@surrey.ac.uk) about costing it into your bid. They can help you cost any technical or security requirements for your bids.

Surrey provides long term storage through our repository, retaining the data for a minimum of ten years. Some discipline specific repositories charge for hosting data long term. Remember to account for any preservation costs before the end of your funding period. Consider including the date you intend to deposit your data in your data management plan as soon as you can.