Funder open access requirements

To encourage researchers to make their work openly available, many research funders now require that publications that acknowledge their funding should be open access. It’s also an integral part of REF2021.

Plan S

Plan S is an initiative for Open Access supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations. The Plan S principles inform the open access policies of the cOAlition S funders, for example UKRI and the Wellcome Trust, to realise the ambition of immediate open access for publicly funded research.

REF Open Access Policy

The REF 2021 publication period closed on 31 December 2020 and we are now in the publication period for REF 2029. However researchers should continue to comply with the requirements of the REF 2021 Open Access policy.

The University of Salford Open Access Policy has been designed so that, if you follow the University of Salford Policy you will automatically comply with the REF Open Access Policy. According to the policy, staff and postgraduate students must submit their journal articles or conference contributions with an ISSN to USIR via Worktribe at the point of acceptance for publication, and no later than three months after that date. The version of the paper that needs to be submitted is the final version submitted by the author(s) before formal acceptance for publication.

More information on the REF is available at REF 2029.

UKRI Open Access Policy

The UKRI Open Access Policy applies to peer-reviewed research articles, and monographs, book chapters and edited collections that acknowledge funding from UKRI or any of its councils - AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, Innovate UK (IUK), MRC, NERC, Research England (RE), STFC.

For peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022, the key requirements include:

immediate open access with a CC BY licence (CC BY ND by exception) for research articles, either via the published version (gold open access) or the deposit of the authors accepted manuscript in a repository like USIR (green open access)
a requirement to notify the publisher of licensing at the point of submission for compliance with green open access, by including the following statement

'For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence (where permitted by UKRI, 'Open Government Licence' or 'Creative Commons Attribution No-derivatives (CC BY-ND) licence may be stated instead) to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising'

Our UKRI block grant can no longer be used to pay for open access in subscription (hybrid) journals unless the journal is part of a transitional agreement. These agreements transition journals from being a subscription title to being a pure open access journal. Details of the University of Salford's transitional deals are available on our website.
UKRI requires in-scope research articles to include a Data Access Statement, even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible.

For monographs published on or after 1 January 2024, the key requirements include:

the final published version or accepted manuscript to be open access via a publisher's website, platform, or repository, within a maximum of 12 months of publication
CC BY licence is preferred, but NC and ND licences are permitted.
Authors will be able to apply to UKRI for monograph open access funding.
Some long-form output types are out of scope, for example textbooks and creative works.

Authors must establish how they will meet the open access requirements when they choose a publisher and before submission. Please get in touch via library-research@salford.ac.uk to discuss how you can ensure you are compliant if:

you submit an article after 1 April 2022 which acknowledges UKRI funding
you are, or will be working, on a monograph which will be published from 1 January 2024 and acknowledges UKRI funding
you require UKRI to approve a licence exception.

Other funder Open Access Policies

If your research is funded by the following funders, you must ensure any resulting publications and associated data meet your funder open access requirements.

Data Access Statements

Data access statements are used in research publications to explain where supporting data can be found and under what conditions they can be accessed. Data access statements are required for all publications which are publicly funded. They often appear as a statement in the article and many journals will have data availability statement templates. But not all journals do, so you may have to include equivalent text elsewhere in the article. Further information and example wording for data access statements can be found on the open research website.