Effective Research Publishing: Open Research & Open Access: Open Access Costs (UKRI Funded Research Articles)

Open Access Support 2024/2025

UKRI & Innovate UK Funded Research - Open Access Block Grant

What does it cover?

UKRI articles and conference proceedings submitted after 1 April 2022: all peer reviewed research articles, including reviews and conference papers published in proceedings with an ISSN or platform are within scope.

UKRI includes AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC and Innovate UK.

Articles and conference proceedings:

• must be made open access immediately upon publication with no embargo.  
• must be published with a Creative Commons CC-BY attribution licence. An exception for CC-BY-ND no derivatives will be possible upon application and approval. Complete the UKRI No derivatives licence exception form (10 day UKRI service level response).
• biomedical research articles that acknowledge MRC or BBSRC funding are required to be archived in Europe PubMed Central, in accordance with MRC’s Additional Terms and Conditions and BBSRC’s Safeguarding Good Research Policy
• must include a data access statement even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible. Further information is available from the research data support guide.

How do I comply with the funder's open access policy?

Make your article immediately open access via a journal/publishing platform or use a repository for self-archiving.

• At acceptance, deposit the accepted manuscript (AAM) in the Research Information System (RIS). 
• Upon first online publication the article document should be released in the repository with a CC-BY licence. 
• We are able to use the version of record (VOR) document where we have paid the publisher for open access or the author accepted manuscript (AAM) for self-archiving using route 2. No publisher embargo is required.

UKRI Compliance Route 1 (gold) 
a. Publish in a fully open access journal or platform

We can pay article processing charges (APCs) in open access journals. 

• Use the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to find Open Access journals in your discipline. 

Compliance Route 1 (gold)
b. Publish in a subscription journal covered by a 'Transitional Agreement'. Check the Publisher OA Agreements tab on this guide.

Compliance Route 1 (gold)
c. Publish in a subscription journal with 'Transformative Journal' status

• We can pay an article processing charge (APC) in a transformative journal if it is not covered by one of the 'read and publish' Library publishing agreements. This financial arrangement ends on 31 December 2024.

UKRI Compliance Route 2 (green)
Publish in a subscription journal and self-archive the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in the repository with a CC-BY licence

• At the point of submission include the following rights retention statement in the funding acknowledgement section of the manuscript and include it with an accompanying letter or email. Publishers are aware of the rights retention strategy enabled by the Swansea University Research Publications Policy.

'For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising.’

Contact Open Access Support

Before you apply for funding:

Check the Swansea University Publisher Open Access Agreements webpage.
These agreements are facilitated financially by the Library to cover the cost of gold open access publication at no direct cost for our UKRI  authors.

Journal Checker Tool 
Add journal title + Funder name + Swansea University to view journal compliance status

To qualify for funding from the UKRI open access block grant fund:

• The author must usually be a current member of Swansea University.
• Apply for funding when your article is accepted for publication and provide documentation to support the application (acceptance email).
• Upload the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) when submitting a request. 
• We do not accept applications for retrospective conversion to gold open access for articles that are already published.  Please contact the open access team to discuss issues with specific publications. The decision to deviate from the stated policy lies with the research organisation.

• UKRI Open Access Policy FAQs v1.9 2023

  UKRI Open Access Policy – Frequently Asked Questions

• UKRI Policy Home

• High-level summary of UKRI’s OA policy

  Articles, monographs, preprints

Equality, diversity and inclusion 
Organisations are expected to ensure that equality, diversity and inclusion is considered and supported when allocating funds from the open access block grant.

Your research publications must acknowledge funding received from research councils. A data availability statement should be included [even where no data are available].

Acknowledgement of funding should be a sentence with the funding agency written out in full, followed by the grant number in square brackets (if you have one). For example:

‘This work was supported by the Medical Research Council [grant number xxxx]’.

Multiple grant numbers should be separated by comma and space. Where the research was supported by more than one agency, the different agencies should be separated by a semicolon, with “and” before the final funder. For example:

‘This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number zzzz]; and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number XXXX]’.

JISC provide details of the criteria journals must achieve in order to meet this status. You can also find a definition of a transformative journal on the Plan S website. 

To decide if your chosen journal is a transformative journal you can check the list of cOAlition Plan S transformative journals or use the Plan S Journal Checker tool. 

UKRI apply the JISC transformative journal requirement definition for subscription and hybrid journals.

UKRI require a compliant green open access route to be available in a transformative journal. This means that you are able to deposit the author accepted manuscript with a Creative Commons CC-BY licence and release it upon publication with no embargo (rights retention).