Complying with research funders’ open access policies

The issue

Research Councils UK (RCUK) now require papers resulting from research they’ve funded to be published open access, preferably in journals that make papers immediately available at no charge to readers (gold open access).

Costs to authors will be met by RCUK via block grants to universities. Alternatively, papers can be published in traditional subscription journals that allow free access after an embargo period via the author’s institutional repository (green open access).

What you can do

Streamline your article publication payments

The introduction of block grants to pay for publication charges creates a new administrative burden for researchers, universities, funders and publishers.

We’ve entered into an agreement with Open Access Key to develop a single, centralised, online administration platform to manage the processing of article publication charges, saving all those involved time and money. A one year pilot project began in March 2013. Find out more, or express your interest in joining the pilot at a later date.

Find out more about policies

Sherpa-Juliet lists policies for more than a hundred funders in 19 countries.  A complementary service, Sherpa-Romeo, lists publishers’ policies on authors placing research papers on their own websites or in open access repositories.

Comply with your funder’s policy

Sherpa-Romeo, in conjunction with RCUK and the Wellcome Trust, have launched a beta service which allows authors to find out whether the journal in which they wish to publish complies with their funder’s open access policy and, if so, how to proceed. Institutions will eventually be able to embed the guidance into their own web pages.

Looking ahead

Jisc will be producing information for learned societies and journal editors who are considering making their journals open access. We’re also exploring the case for shared services to enable repositories to work more efficiently and effectively in supporting open access via the green route.