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Effective Research Publishing Handbook

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Apply for UKRI Open Access Block Funding for your Article

Before you apply for funding:

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

To qualify for funding from the 2025/2026 UKRI open access block grant fund:

  • The corresponding author must usually be a current member of Swansea University. The fund also supports postgraduates in receipt of a UKRI training grant.
  • 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 block grant period: April 2025-March 2026
Apply for financial support from the UKRI Open Access Block Grant by completing the online application form (Sharepoint) 

Research Councils (UKRI) OA Block Grant Eligibility Criteria

Open Access Support 2025/2026

UKRI & Innovate UK Funded Research - Open Access Block Grant (01/04/2025-31/03/2026)

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:

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.

UKRI Compliance Route 1 (gold) Payment Required
a. Publish in a fully open access journal or platform. This makes the version or record document immediately open access via the journal website with a Creative Commons attribution (CC-BY) licence or other permitted licence.

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

UKRI Compliance Route 2 (green) No Payment Required
b. Publish in a subscription journal and self-archive the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in the repository with a CC-BY licence and no embargo. 

  • At the point of submission you can choose to include a 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. if you do not include the statement you can still rely on this legal 'prior license' to enable rights retention for your paper.

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

UKRI - Funding & Data Access Statements

The article should acknowledge UKRI funding.
A data availability statement should be included [even where no data are available]. Authors must include a statement about how to access the data underlying their work, or explain why data cannot be openly shared.

UKRI Resources

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.