Open Access & Institutional Repository: Cancer Research UK

Cancer Research UK (CRUK) has updated its open access policy for research articles accepted from 1^st January 2022 

• The policy applies to research articles and meta analyses.
• The policy does not apply to review papers, editorials, commentary, book chapters or monographs.

• An electronic copy of the final, published form of your paper (either the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) or Version of Record (VoR) must be made openly available in Europe PMC immediately on publication.

• Your paper must be published with a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY 4.0), so that it may be freely copied and reused, providing that the original authors are properly credited. Other licenses will not be compliant with your Grant Conditions.

• CRUK will only fund Open access charges where the publisher is compliant with their policy. Authors can publish in hybrid or fully open access journals providing the journal offers immediate open access and CC BY license and has a fair and reasonable APC cost

• Articles must Include in the acknowledgment ‘This work was supported by Cancer Research UK [C ref./A ref.]’ and, for trial results, the CRUK trial number.

Routes to Open Access and paying Open Access Fees

STEP 1 –  Use Sherpa Fact to check whether your preferred journal offers a compliant option. For additional clarification, check the journal website. If you are unsure whether your journal complies, contact The Library Open Research Team before submission eprints@soton.ac.uk

STEP 2 – If the journal allows you to deposit immediately under a CC BY license into an institutional (i.e. Pure) or Subject Repository (i.e. PubMed Europe) follow this route (this is known as Green open access)

STEP 3 Check to see if your preferred journal is included in one of the University's publisher agreements  or Apply for payment of open access costs (Article Processing Charges, APCs) from the block Grant from CRUK which the Library administers

Please apply online to the CRUK block grant, managed by the Library, at the point of submission rather than acceptance. This enables eligibility to be checked and funds allocated prior to costs being incurred.

Eligibility requirements

• Cancer research articles to be published immediately in journals with a CC BY licence
• Acknowledge their CRUK grant in the required way ‘This work was supported by Cancer Research UK [C ref./A ref.]’ and, for trial results, the CRUK trial number. Please post this in the Any other Information field.
• CRUK Grants held by University of Southampton or where University of Southampton is part of an official consortium

Applications for APCs must be made on submission using the online form.  If the application is approved, the provisional offer will stand for 6 months, and can be extended if the paper is still undergoing the review process. 

You will need your grant Id to complete the form. If the funding was via a studentship please put studentship followed by the student's name

We cannot accept applications for page, colour, cover charges or any extra publication charges not related to open access.

APC Application Form

STEP 4 – If your preferred journal does not allow you to make your article open access immediately or does not offer the CC BY license, contact the journal editor to ask if they will permit you with a waiver or look at another journal. CRUK believes this will be a very small amount of journals, however.

Please contact eprints@soton.ac.uk with any open access enquiries.

Many research funders require outputs underpinned by their grant to be made open access at the point of publication and with a CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution) license. The Blood journals, published by the American Society of Hematology, including their open access title Blood Advances, do not comply because they only offer the more restrictive Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license.  

This may prevent some authors from being able to publish in Blood journals. The only potential route to compliance at present is to include a statement in the acknowledgements assigning a CC BY license to the accepted manuscript arising and manually depositing a copy in the Europe PubMed repository. Please note, we cannot pay publishing charges in Blood Advances until a publisher enabled route to compliance is available. 

If you have any questions please contact the Open Research and Publications Practice Team via eprints@soton.ac.uk