UKRI's new Open Access policy: Long-form outputs

UKRI is introducing a new Open Access policy for long-form outputs which will take effect from January 2024.

Overview

If you are publishing a UKRI long-form output (monograph, book chapter or edited collection) on or after 1 January 2024, you must follow the UKRI Open Access policy.

This applies to publications that need to acknowledge funding from UKRI or any of its councils. This includes funding from:

the research councils (AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC)
Research England
Innovate UK

There is no requirement for monographs, book chapters and edited collections published before 1 January 2024 to be published Open Access. Long-form outputs acknowledging a UKRI grant that closed 7 or more years ago will not need to comply with the policy, nor will they be eligible for financial support from UKRI.

UKRI's open access policy does not apply to the following long-form outputs:

Trade books (as defined in UKRI's Open Access policy) unless they are the only output from UKRI-funded research.
Scholarly editions - defined as an edition of another author's original work or body of work informed by critical evaluation of the sources (such as earlier manuscripts, texts, documents and letters), often with a scholarly introduction and explanatory notes or analysis on the text and/or original author.
Exhibition catalogues
Scholarly illustrated catalogues
Textbooks
All types of fictional work and creative writing

Applying for funding

Funding

From January 2024 approximately £3.5 million will be dedicated to supporting Open Access for long-form outputs via a national ring-fenced fund. The fund will be centrally held by UKRI, and research organisations will apply to UKRI to access it.

The application window to request funding from UKRI to pay Open Access fees for long-form outputs is now open – to submit a request, please use our UKRI long-form output funding request form

Applications to the fund will be submitted via an online form and via a staged application process:

At stage 1 the research organisation registers the output with UKRI for funding. A publishing contract does not need to be signed for a stage 1 application.
At stage 2 the research organisation provides final confirmation of publication to allow UKRI to release the funds.

UKRI will confirm if a publication is eligible for funding after stage 1. In order to be successful, applications will need to demonstrate a substantial link between the publication and UKRI research funding, as well as between the author and UKRI research funding.

UKRI have published full guidance on applying to the fund and permissible costs on their website.

Submit a funding request

We are now accepting requests for UKRI's central fund, which can be made via this form. To complete the form you will need:

Grant code(s) for your UKRI funding
An estimate for the cost of publishing your long-form output Open Access

Support for Book Processing Charges (BPCs) will be capped at £10,000 (inclusive of VAT) and support for chapters will be capped at £1,000. If the quote you've received from your book publisher is higher than the cap, you can still submit a funding request. The Library will be in touch to discuss your options.

Once you have submitted the form, we will submit your request to UKRI. The funder aims to respond to stage 1 applications within 10 days. Please do not notify publishers that you will be able to pay a BPC/Open Access fee for a chapter until your funding request has been approved.

Once your funding request has been approved

If UKRI approve your funding request, you will need to ensure that your book is made Open Access under a Creative Commons License as soon as it is published. Any delay between publication and the electronic version of the book being openly available may result in UKRI withholding funding.

Open Access requirements

UKRI has published new supporting guidance for authors about their Open Access requirements for long-form outputs.

You must make your UKRI-funded monographs, book chapters and edited collections Open Access within 12 months of publication and use an open licence. You can achieve compliance by either:

sharing your publication via Pure or another repository with an embargo of no longer than 12 months, or
arranging for the publication to be made immediately Open Access by the publisher (with costs met via funding from UKRI).

In summary, the key requirements of the policy are:

your final Version of Record or Author's Accepted Manuscript must be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publisher's website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication.
images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content should be included in the open access version, where possible.
the open access version of your publication must have a Creative Commons licence (see the UKRI's supplementary FAQs) for more information).

These requirements and definitions of in-scope and exempt types of publication are further detailed in the UKRI Open Access policy.

If you plan, with agreement from your publisher, to comply with the policy by depositing a version of your publication in a repository, you can use either:

Pure
an appropriate subject repository

Troubleshooting

UKRI recognises that there may be instances where meeting Open Access requirements for long-form outputs may not be possible. For information on policy exemptions, please UKRI's guidance page for making your monograph, book chapter or edited collection Open Access.

Further information

If you have a question about the new policy, please:

Check for an answer to your query in the UKRI Open Access policy and supplementary FAQs
Email libraryresearch@manchester.ac.uk

For further information about how UKRI is implementing these requirements and how they were decided, please see UKRI's webpage on shaping the Open Access policy.