Implementing the UKRI open access policy

Open access (OA) allows the findings of publicly funded research to be accessed, shared and reused. Jisc is helping members effectively implement the UKRI OA policy by building on our existing activities and tools, and working with a range of stakeholders.

The UKRI open access policy

Following extensive consultation with the sector, UKRI announced their updated open access policy for research publications in August 2021.

UKRI’s updated open access policy requires immediate open access for peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication from 1 April 2022. It also includes a new requirement for monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024 to be made open access within 12 months of publication.

We welcome the updated policy as a significant driver in the delivery of open access research in the UK, which will, in turn, benefit the wider community.

How is Jisc going to support members and the wider research community?

We will help our members effectively implement the policy by building upon our existing activities and helping the sector maintain momentum in pursuit of a sustainable transition to full and immediate open access for all research.

Our work in supporting the implementation includes:

• Rapidly scaling up sustainable, affordable open access agreements to provide UKRI-funded researchers and their publishers, with the opportunity to access compliant routes to publish
• Gathering and analysing data to monitor and evaluate the performance of transitional arrangements to enable our members, funders and publishers to understand the progress and impact of these arrangements in the context of the UK’s ambition to achieve 100% open access
• Working with our members, UKRI, publishers - including a diversity of research organisations - and representative bodies, to develop an understanding of the challenges around open access, to share and develop best practice, and deliver support
• Preparing and equipping our members with tools, guidance and publishing options in support of the open access monographs policy
• Providing tools for authors and research organisations to navigate available open access options, improve workflows and automate reporting

Find out more about Jisc's role in supporting the implementation (pdf).

What have we done so far?

We have:

• We have contacted over 250 publishers and negotiated over 100 transitional agreements via all routes (transitional agreements, transformative journals, Subscribe to Open, fully open access, Green open access etc)
• Identified and agreed with our members their requirements for transformative journals (TJs) and incorporated TJs as one of the models that publishers can adopt/authors can publish in
• Increased our engagement and negotiations with the many small and medium-sized publishers and societies and provided them with the opportunity to adopt OA models that enable compliant options for UKRI funded authors and meet the requirements of our members
• Expanded our data collation and analysis which enables us to deliver quality data and intelligence to our members and UKRI, to drive value, and to evaluate the impact of transitional agreements
• Established new partnerships that will support the accurate and timely sharing of data so that authors have the most up to date information to support publication decisions, in particular with the cOAlition S supported Journal Checker Tool (JCT)
• Created a digital research community group to facilitate discussion between researchers and the sharing of ideas across a full spectrum of activities related to research within institutions
• Developed new intelligence dashboards to monitor and analyse the current compliance and eligibility figures by journal, subject area, article using data from a variety of sources including Dimensions, CrossRef, JCT, and KB+
• Announced a new approach to supporting publishers or initiatives operating under the diamond open access model – open access publishing with no subscription or author facing fees -  with the open access community framework (OACF)

Post 1 April 2022

We continued with the above, as well as:

• negotiating agreements to cover approximately 95% of UKRI journal article output by April 2023 - we met our target in November 2022, and have since reached 97.7% compliance when measuring articles, and 92.5% when measuring journals (November 2023)
• engaging with publishers to put in place new models that publishers can adopt/authors can publish in
• implementing agreements/arrangements with publishers that provide compliant publication routes for 30% of UKRI funded long-form outputs (as identified in ResearchFish data) by 30 June 2024. This target (at 27.28% as of March 2024) will be met by prioritising equitable, inclusive, fair and affordable monographs agreements with smaller academic led presses, independent publishers and aggregators and by piloting subject collection based ‘Purchase to Open’ models with larger book publishers
• negotiating compliant agreements/arrangements with 25 long-form publishers listed in the REF 2021 dataset by 30 June 2024 (we met this target in March 2024)
• increasing our engagement with our members, research organisations, publishers and funders, through a series of roundtables, workshops, webinars and regular communications whereby we can continue to discuss the challenges around the implementation and to consider solutions that will reduce bureaucracy and increase efficiency. Read the report from our workshop with publishers to consider the UKRI open access policy on longform publications, with specific reference to the use of Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) for book chapters as a route to compliance.
• creating a variety of resources for members to download and share, including infographics, short guides, online guidance, and resources from webinars
• developing a new tool for open access monographs