The new open access policy for REF 2029 has been announced and we now know the criteria that must be met for publications to be eligible for REF submission.

First, the new policy will apply to research outputs published after 1 January 2026. For outputs published between January 2021 and December 2025, the old open access policy still applies.

Below are the key points about the new policy, but it should be noted that there will be no changes to the current workflow for ENU authors. As always, we advise that publications are deposited in Worktribe upon acceptance, along with a copy of the accepted manuscript. The repository team will then ensure that the deposit is completed, and the output is REF eligible.

Key information on the REF 2029 open access policy:

The policy applies to journal articles and published conference papers only. Longform publications such as books are not included in the policy, and they are not required to be open access.

The main changes in the new policy are:

• Permitted embargo periods are halved: they will be 6 months for outputs in panels A & B and 12 months for outputs in panels C & D. Publishers are expected to reduce their embargo periods accordingly.
• License applied to published outputs or to accepted manuscripts should be as open as possible, preferably CC BY, but others are also permitted, for example CC BY-NC-ND.

We hope to have a new institutional open access policy in place later this year which will help us meet these new criteria.

You can make your publication open access by using one of the ENU read and publish deals or via the green open access route, by depositing the accepted manuscript in the repository. Email us at repository@napier.ac.uk if you have any questions.