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
The policy also includes monographs, book chapters and edited collections published on or after 1 January 2024
UKRI have a helpful guide to Publishing your research findings
If you have any questions, please contact eprints@soton.ac.uk
Before you submit to a journal, please check that your article:
Journal article publishing routes for the new policy, for articles submitted from April 2022: open access is required 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. 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 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.
"For clarity, it is preferable that the licensing notification statement is retained in the version of record, but the publisher can ask for it to be removed.
We expect publishers to not remove the statement from the author’s accepted manuscript to ensure there is clarity on how UKRI's licensing requirements for Route 2 of the policy have been applied.
If a publisher has accepted your submission with the statement included, they should allow you to make your authors accepted manuscript open access in a repository under a CC BY licence to comply via Route 2 of UKRI’s policy. If the publisher subsequently refuses to permit this, authors should inform their institution and UKRI."
Section C4 of the UKRI Open Access Policy – Frequently Asked Questions, November 2022 update.
If you have any questions please contact the Open Research and Publications Practice Team via eprints@soton.ac.uk
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).
| 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.
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
"From January 2024, approximately £3.5 million will be dedicated to supporting open access for long-form outputs via a separate ring-fenced fund. The fund will be centrally held by UKRI and research organisations will apply to UKRI to access it.
The process to apply for funds and definition of eligible costs are currently being developed. We will publish these no later than April 2023.
We will make the application process as easy as possible, in line with our commitment to reduce bureaucracy. The fund will support open access via different open access publishing models, to best enable researchers and organisations to meet the aims of the policy and support sustainability of open access to monographs."
From UKRI: Implementing our open access policy
"UKRI is aware that researchers may be negotiating contracts for longform outputs that will be published on or after 1 January 2024. Our policy includes an exception for when a contract has been signed between the author and the publisher before this date that prevents adherence to the policy. However, we strongly encourage authors and publishers to make publications open access within a year of the publication date. This exception also applies to authors contributing book chapters for edited books."
Section G1 of the UKRI Open Access Policy – Frequently Asked Questions, November 2022 update.
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.