Complying with the UKRI open access policy for publishers

The issue

Most major research funders now have policies that require research outputs acknowledging their funding to be made open access (OA). Jisc is working with publishers to offer authors compliant routes that meet a range of different funders’ requirements. We are contacting publishers that have published one or more UKRI funded research article per year on average over the past five years to ensure that all UKRI funded authors have the option to publish in their journal of choice.

The UKRI open access policy

The UKRI OA policy requires that all peer-reviewed research and review articles (including conference proceedings) submitted after 1 April 2022 (that acknowledge funding from UKRI or one of its constituent councils) be published OA immediately, without embargo, under a CC-BY licence. This can be achieved by either:

• Making the final Version of Record (VoR) OA on the journal website/publisher platform (Route 1 – also known as Gold OA), or
• Allowing authors to self-archive the VoR or the Author-Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in a repository (Route 2 – also known as Green OA)

UKRI provides funding to eligible research performing organisations to support implementation of the policy in the form of block grants. The policy includes guidance on how block grants can be used.

Guidance for publishers on the UKRI open access policy

To support publishers in understanding the steps they need to take to offer compliant publication options to UKRI funded authors, we've created a series of short guides. These aim to explain key concepts in the UKRI open access policy, as well as open access more broadly.

Download Jisc's guides to:

• CC-BY licence (pdf)
• Compliant green agreements (pdf)
• Diamond open access for books (pdf)
• Diamond open access for books and UKRI funding (pdf)
• Directory of open access journals (pdf)
• Fully open access agreements (pdf)
• Gold open access route 1 (pdf)
• Green open access for book chapters (pdf)
• Green open access route 2 (pdf)
• Open access community framework (pdf)
• Rights retention (pdf)
• Sherpa (pdf)
• Subscribe to open (pdf)
• Transitional agreements (pdf)
• Understanding UKRI open access monograph book chapter and edited collections policy (pdf)

Please share these documents with your colleagues and publishing networks.

UKRI open access funding restrictions

Although publishing OA in a hybrid journal is compliant with UKRI’s OA policy via Route 1, UKRI block grants cannot be used to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) for articles published in hybrid journals, unless the article is published under a Jisc-approved transitional agreement (TA) or in a transformative journal (TJ) that meets the sector’s criteria for transformative journals. (Please note: after 31 December 2024, research organisations will not be able to use their open access block grant for transformative journal publication costs).

The following list provides a summary of publication routes that are compliant with UKRI’s OA policy, and potentially also eligible for OA costs to be paid from UKRI funds.