UKRI's new open access policy begins on Friday 1 April. The policy applies to University of Bath staff, postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers. In brief the policy requires that if your research is funded by UKRI:
- You must make your journal articles and peer reviewed conference papers open access
- Your work must be available immediately upon publication, without any embargo
- Your work must carry a CC-BY license (unless you have an approved exception from UKRI)
- You can publish in a fully OA journal or a journal that is part of a recognised open access agreement the library has signed up to
- You must put a statement in your paper explaining how people can access the underlying data on which your research is based
The key changes in this policy are that publisher embargoes will not be allowed, and there are new requirements affecting which journals are considered compliant with the policy.
Regarding electronic doctoral theses, the current policy of allowing a 12-month embargo from the date of award still stands; there is no change to this in the new policy.
Library Research Services have provided some additional information and resources on our web pages:
- a more detailed explanation of the policy within our Meeting Funder Requirements page
- a list of the open access Transformative Agreements that we have signed up to – sometimes known as ‘Read & Publish’ deals - on our Publisher Agreements page
- a journal checker form you can use to check whether a specific journal provides a compliant route to open access publication
- a flowchart to help you make your publication open access and compliant with the policy
The UKRI block grant will be available from 1 April and you can apply for funding now to pay article processing charges in fully open access journals. Some additional funding will be available to pay APCs in compliant transformative journals as approved by UKRI for funding.
For help and advice please contact the open access team at: openaccess@bath.ac.uk