UKRI Open Access Policy - in effect from 1 April 2022

This page will be updated as more detail is released by UKRI.

UKRI’s new open access policy applies to all UKRI funding bodies and came into effect on 1 April 2022 for peer-reviewed research articles submitted from this date and will come into effect on 1 January 2024 for monographs, book chapters and edited collections.

If you have an award from UKRI or one of their councils, you must follow their open access requirements when publishing a research publication acknowledging their funding. This includes funding from:

• the Research Councils
• Research England
• Innovate UK.

Requirements will depend on the type of publication and when you plan to submit or publish.

• research articles must be made available immediately as open access, without embargo (this applies to articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022)
• articles should be made open access through a gold route in an open access journal or publishing platform, or through a green route by depositing the author accepted manuscript in an institutional or subject repository such as Loughborough’s Research Repository
• researchers should only use UKRI funding to publish in a pure gold open access journal or in a subscription “hybrid” journal covered by a transitional agreement agreed with Jisc (an up-to-date list of such agreements is available on our web pages [VPN access needed off campus])
• articles must be made available using a CC BY licence, or CC BY ND by exception – this includes a requirement to notify the publisher of this licence at the point of submission. The following wording (please edit as required) should be included on submitted manuscripts in the funding acknowledgement section and any covering 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.”
• articles must include a Data Access Statement, even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible.

Preprints are not covered by the new open access policy. To facilitate open research practices, UKRI encourages the use of preprints across the research disciplines that they support. A statement on preprints will be produced at a later date. 

• monographs, book chapters and edited collections published on and after 1 January 2024 must be made open access within a maximum of 12 months of publication
• the final version of the publication must be made open access via a publisher’s website, platform or repository, or the accepted manuscript must be deposited in a repository such as Loughborough’s Research Repository
• monographs must be made available using a CC BY licence, although NC and ND licences are permitted as alternatives.
• UKRI have made a fund available to help cover the costs of paying for gold open access (i.e. Book or Chapter Processing Charges). There is a multi-stage process involved:
  1. Authors should liaise with their publisher regarding the UKRI open access requirements to ensure they can be compliant.
  2. Authors should contact the Library (before a contract is signed) by using the UKRI open access long-form request form. If you have any questions please email the Library's Open Research Team.
  3. The Library will contact UKRI with your request and we will receive a reply on the eligibility of your application with 10 working days.
  4. The Library will contact you with the response.
  5. If the response is positive from UKRI the Library will contact you to arrange details for paying the invoice.
  6. Authors should contact the Open Research Team once your book, chapter, or edited collection is public so that the Library can request re-imbursement from UKRI.

UKRI are to provide up to £46.7 million per year to support the implementation of the policy.

Please see the UKRI Block Grant Allocation Policy 2022/23 for Loughborough specific criteria for journal articles and conference proceedings.

UKRI will cover costs for long-form outputs (books, book chapters, edited collections) up to £10,000 for books and £1,000 for chapters. As many open access charges are more than these limits, the University will cover any open access fee above these limits. This institutional commitment is limited to those long-form outputs which are in-scope of the UKRI open access policy.

More information on the long-form open access funding, application process, and eligibility criteria is available on the UKRI fund webpages.

Please contact us with any questions.

Read the full UKRI open access policy.