UKRI announced a new open access policy a few months ago, which comes into effect from 1 April 2022. All peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication on or after this date, which are funded by UKRI grants (i.e. any of the Research Councils or Innovate UK), will need to be made open access immediately upon publication with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

The policy will also apply to monographs, book chapters and edited collections published on or after 1 January 2024. There are slightly different guidelines for book publishing and separate funding will be made available by UKRI to cover the costs.

The UKRI policy is different to the REF open access policy, as it only applies to grant funded research.

The two routes to make your research open access in accordance with the policy are to deposit the research in Edinburgh Napier’s repository or publish open access in a journal (‘Gold’ open access). Edinburgh Napier does not have funds to pay individual APCs, for those journals that require them, but we do have a number of open access publisher deals where the costs have already been covered.

Authors who use the repository route to compliance should add the following rights retention statement to the acknowledgement section of the manuscript when they submit the article:

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

Any questions about this policy can be directed to either the UKRI team at openresearch@ukri.org or Edinburgh Napier’s repository team at repository@napier.ac.uk