The new UKRI Open Access Policy applies to:
We have written an introductory guide to help answer any questions, available from our Training for Researchers page.
If you have any questions, please contact eprints@soton.ac.uk.
Please note this is not the announcement of the next "future national research assessment exercise" (Research Excellence Framework, REF) open access policy. However, UKRI have made it clear that compliance with their overall open access policy will also ensure compliance for the next REF.
UKRI have a helpful guide to Publishing your research findings.
Please note that UKRI now require a Data Access statement to be included in every journal article, even if no new data were created or the data are not openly available. We have examples of data access statements: https://library.soton.ac.uk/researchdata/access-statements
Journal article publishing routes for the new policy, for articles submitted from April 2022:
The version of record is available with a CC BY licence immediately from the journal website. The following is unchanged from the old UKRI open access policy:
UKRI are supplying institutions with a block grant to support publication in fully open access journals where a reasonable fee for open access is charged. Please apply prior to submission so that we can guarantee the funds: http://go.soton.ac.uk/asc
We cannot use the block grant to pay open access/publishing fees in a 'hybrid' journal that contains both open access and subscription content. However, you can publish open access in hybrid journals if we have a 'transitional/transformative agreement’, OR use route 2 (self-archiving in our institutional repository).
Always upload your Author Accepted Manuscript to Pure as soon as your article is accepted to ensure it meets the University of Southampton open access policy. Additionally, biomedical research articles that acknowledge MRC or BBSRC funding are required to be archived in Europe PubMed Central - check that your publisher will do this on your behalf if you are using Route 1.
Deposit your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in Pure with a CC BY license and no publisher enforced embargo using Rights Retention. Your Author Accepted Manuscript is the version incorporating any changes resulting from peer review, but without any publisher logos.
When you anticipate the publisher version of the article will be behind a paywall in a hybrid journal, you should assign your own CC BY licence to the ‘Author Accepted Manuscript’ by including the following wording in the funder acknowledgements section: “For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising”.
This prior assignment of rights allows the Author Accepted Manuscript to be made openly available from an institutional repository with no publisher-mandated embargo.
Our institutional repository team will check all AAMs uploaded to Pure for a prior assignment of rights statement but we recommend that when you add an Author Accepted Manuscript that includes the rights retention wording, please apply a CC BY licence and paste the Funder Acknowledgements section to the Bibliographic notes field.
The Author Accepted Manuscript of biomedical research articles that acknowledge MRC or BBSRC funding must be archived by the authors in Europe PubMed Central. The publisher will generally not do this on your behalf if you are using Route 2.
Applying for payment of open access costs (Article Processing Charges, APCs) for journal articles acknowledging Wellcome Trust or UKRI funding (AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC).
| Update: from 27th November, 2020 the Library will no longer approve applications to access funds to pay for publishing in hybrid journals (journals containing both open access and subscription content), unless they are covered by a ‘no additional cost’ transformative agreement with the publisher. We will continue to consider applications from Wellcome and UKRI funded authors to publish in fully open access journals. |
We can accept applications for open access costs from our UKRI and Wellcome Trust block grants for:
Please apply online to the UKRI 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.
Please contact eprints@soton.ac.uk with any open access enquiries.
Information updated November 2020 to reflect that we can no longer fund hybrid applications.
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
The new UKRI Open Access Policy applies to journal articles submitted for publication from 1 April 2022. Steven Vidovic, Head of Open Research and Publication Practice, explains the rationale of the policy and highlights key points in this townhall event recorded on 30 March 2022. This recording is available to University of Southampton staff and students.