Open Access (OA)

UKRI Open Access Update: February 2022

UKRI have announced a new open access policy for UKRI funded researchers, which replaces the current policy and takes effect for articles submitted for publication from the 1st of April 2022 and for monographs/book chapters published from the 1st of January 2024. 'Books' includes edited books, editions etc, but excludes trade books and textbooks.

Key changes

● Articles must be available open access by the publication date either through publishing open access in a journal or by depositing the Author Accepted Manuscript in a repository such as WRRO.

● When submitting an article for publication, authors must include the following text in the funding acknowledgement section of their manuscript and any covering letter/note:

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

*where permitted by UKRI a CC-BY-ND licence may be stated instead

● From the 1st of April 2022, support from the open access block grant is limited to Article Processing Charges (APCs) for fully open access journals. APCs will only be covered for subscription/hybrid publications if they are part of a transitional agreement as agreed with Jisc. Page/colour charges are no longer covered.

● Longform publications such as monographs and book chapters will need to be made available open access within one year of publication. UKRI are going to cover the cost of Book Processing Charges via a centralised fund (details of how this will operate are still to be released).

For full details of the policy and how University of Sheffield authors can comply, please see the Library guidance.