This page contains guidance on the UKRI Open Access Policy for peer reviewed research articles.
We also have a page with guidance on the UKRI Open Access Policy for longform outputs (monographs, book chapters and edited collections).
The UKRI Open Access Policy requires open access at the time of publication, either in the journal or via self-archiving in a repository. It applies to:
Peer-reviewed research articles, including reviews and conference papers
acknowledging funding from AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC, Innovate UK or Research England
accepted for publication in a journal, conference proceeding with an ISSN, or by a publishing platform
If you have any questions, please contact eprints@soton.ac.uk
Open access is required by UKRI at the point of publication, using either Route 1 or Route 2.
The version of record is available with a CC BY licence immediately from the journal website.
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 publisher agreement’
OR use route 2 (self-archiving in our institutional repository). Please use our journal check tool to see if your journal is included in one of our publisher agreements.
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 prior assignment of rights. 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 statement, 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.
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.