Open Access Policies

There are Open Access (OA) policies that authors of output must comply with the University's OA policy, the research funder's OA policy, and the publisher's copyright policy. If outputs acknowledge multiple funding sources, then you need to ensure that you comply with each funder’s requirements.

The University's OA Policy

The University's Open Access and Institutional Rights Retention Policy commenced from 1st September 2025. Publication types in scope of the policy are research articles published in journals and conference proceedings with an ISSN. To comply, the author accepted manuscript should be uploaded to Pure as soon as possible after acceptance, and no later than 1 month from the date of first publication.

The policy also supports University authors with rights retention. This enables the author accepted manuscript to be made Open Access on the University's Research Portal, without embargo and with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license applied to the manuscript. Following rights retention ensures that your article meets compliance for research funders, including the REF OA Policy and the UKRI OA Policy.

Rights retention is only relevant if you are not publishing Gold OA. If that is the case, to safeguard rights retention for your article, authors are strongly encouraged to add a rights retention statement into the acknowledgements of the manuscript submitted for publication: "For the purpose of open access, the author(s) has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission." 

For further information about the University's Institutional Rights Retention Policy, see this short video.

The REF OA Policy

Publication types in-scope of the REF 2029 OA Policy are peer-reviewed research articles published in journals and conference proceedings with an ISSN.  Articles published in journals and conference proceedings which do not provide a peer-review process are also in-scope.  In-scope research outputs should meet the key requirements, in order to be eligible for submission to REF 2029.

Key requirements to comply with the policy are:  

• The policy applies to in-scope research outputs published between 1st January 2026 and 31st December 2028.

• In-scope research output types are journal articles and conference contributions in proceedings (with an ISSN).

• Compliant article versions are either the accepted manuscript, or where permitted the published version of record.

• Deposit the author accepted manuscript into Pure within the deadline of 3 months from the date of publication.

• Maximum allowable embargo periods are 6 months (REF Main Panels A & B) and 12 months (REF Main Panels C & D).

• Gold OA research outputs that are fully OA in the publication venue, with an eligible license, comply with the policy.

• Eligible licenses for Gold OA are any of the Creative Commons licenses, or licenses with an equivalent standard of openness.

The UKRI OA Policy

The UKRI OA Policy applies to in scope publications acknowledging research funding from one of its research councils.  This applies to peer-reviewed articles submitted for publication from 1st April 2022. In-scope article types include:

• research and review articles published in journals; conference proceedings with an ISSN; and articls in OA publishing platforms.  

It also applies to long-form publications published from 1st January 2024. Long form publications include:

• book chapters; monographs; and edited collections.

For peer-reviewed articles, the policy requires that:

1. Peer-reviewed research articles acknowledging UKRI funding which are submitted for publication from 1 April 2022 must be immediately open access upon publication (no publisher embargo) via a journal, publishing platform or repository, with a CC-BY licence.  A CC-BY-ND licence will only be permitted by exception.  Please follow this process to request an exception from UKRI. 

Immediate open access can be achieved by one of the following routes: 

a. Publish Gold OA in a fully open access journal or platform with a CC-BY licence. The University’s UKRI open access block grant will cover the open access cost.  Apply for APC funding or email openaccess@port.ac.uk 

b. Publish Gold OA in a journal covered by one of the University’s  Read and Publish agreements.  UKRI will not fund open access or publishing costs in subscription journals that are not covered by such an agreement.

c. Publish in a subscription (‘hybrid’) journal without paying a publication fee and add your Author’s Accepted Manuscript to Pure with a CC-BY licence so that it is immediately open access. You must include the following statement in the acknowledgement section of your submitted manuscript in order to inform the publisher of your intention to retain copyright of the article: "For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC-BY public copyright licence (where permitted by UKRI, ‘Open Government Licence’ or ‘CC-BY-ND public copyright licence’ may be stated instead) to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising."

If you are looking for a compliant journal for your funded research, use the Journal Checker Tool.  

2. Your UKRI funded research or review article requires a Data availability statement.  This applies even if your article does not contain any data, or if it does but the data is not accessible.  For further support with Data Access Statements, email  researchdata@port.ac.uk

3. Biomedical research articles that acknowledge MRC or BBSRC funding are required to be archived in Europe PubMed Central.

For long-form publications, the policy requires that:

1. The 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.

2. Images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content must be included in the open access version, where possible.

3. The open access version of the publication must have a Creative Commons licence, with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence preferred.  An Open Government licence is also permitted.  (This requirement does not apply to third party materials included in the publication.) 

For help with publishing an open access book or chapter, use the OA Books Toolkit.

Contact us

For further guidance on OA compliance, you can contact openaccess@port.ac.uk.