UKRI Open Access Fund

UKRI funded researchers can apply to a central fund to pay for Open Access publication costs.

UKRI announced a revised open access policy to apply to research articles submitted for publication from 1 April 2022.

A new UKRI Open Access policy has been announced, UKRI’s updated policy requires immediate open access for peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication from 1 April 2022. It also includes a new requirement for monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024 to be made open access within 12 months of publication.

As a result, the University has changed its policies on whether or not they can cover researchers’ publication costs.  For 2022-23 UKRI has allocated the University a block grant of to support researchers to comply with their Open Access policy. All original, peer-reviewed research articles, including reviews and conference papers, that are accepted for final publication in either a journal, conference proceeding with an International Standards Serial Number (ISSN) that are supported in whole, or in part, by UKRI must be published immediately open access under a Creative Commons attribution licence (CC BY). Journal embargoes are no longer permitted.

Authors must also include the following statement on all submissions of original research to peer-reviewed journals:

'This research was funded in whole, or in part, by [Funder name] [Grant number]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a creative commons attribution (CC BY) licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising.'

All articles should include a data access statement in the article, the statement can include links to the dataset, where applicable and appropriate and Biomedical research articles that acknowledge MRC or BBSRC must also be deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC.

How to make your article open access

When you get an article accepted for publication please send a copy to your local administrator following the usual process and the publication will be deposited in Pure
If your chosen journal requires payment then please submit a claim via the Journal article open access claim form to the Scholarly Communications Team, we will check details and then get back to you with your open access options. We aim to reply within 48 hours, but if you have an urgent query let us know and we'll do our best to reply sooner.
Before placing an order for paid open access with the publisher a PO is required. Please ensure that you have confirmation that funding is available, otherwise you will be liable for costs and will have to find an alternative source of funding.

Your Open Access options

Generally speaking there are three routes that are available to you to make your research open access. The default route is Green OA which you will automatically follow if you carry out step one above.

Green Open Access

If you have published in a traditional subscription journal, with a paid open access option, the University will not pay the publication charges. Instead you should deposit the paper in Pure and if applicable Europe PubMed Central for free which will comply with the UKRI open access policy. The information you need for deposit in Pure is:

1. Author's Accepted Mansucript - not the publisher's PDF

2. Grant Award information - e.g. ‘This work was supported by the Medical Research Council [grant number xxxx]’.

3. Any Supplementary material that has also been submitted to the journal

If you need to deposit in Europe PMC you can find more information here Europe PMC manuscript submission user guide

Gold Open Access

If you have published in a fully open access journal under a CC-BY licence the University will cover associated article processing charges from the UKRI block grant. A searchable database of journals that we can cover open access charges can be found here:

Directory of Open Access Journals

We will guide you through the options to pick if you let us know about the publication:

Journal article open access claim form

Once you have confirmation that funds are available and you have received a PO then you can go ahead with publication. The Library will arrange payment, either via invoice or through an institutional billing agreement

Read & Publish agreements

If you have published in a journal where the University has a ‘Read & Publish’ deal and you are the corresponding author the article should automatically be made open access by the publisher for no extra charge. A full list of journals included in our Read and Publish agreements is available here:

Read and Publish Journals

Each publisher has a different process, but the normal procedure on the publishers web site is to confirm your affiliation as The University of Edinburgh and indicate your funding and the submission will be authorised by the Library.

What the block grant won't cover

From 1st April 2022 we have been advised by UKRI that the following are not eligible costs:

The cost of hybrid open access publishing in subscription journals unless part of Jisc-approved transitional agreement or in journals approved by Jisc as meeting the research sectors requirements for transition to OA.
Other charges associated with publication, including page and colour charges, and non-open access publication charges and fees.
Open access fees associated with monographs, book chapters and edited collections. UKRI will be making dedicated funding available once the monographs policy is live in 2024, and before then it is permissible to include these costs in grant applications.

This article was published on 2024-08-21