UKRI Open Access Policy: how to comply from 1 April 2022

The new UKRI Open Access (OA) Policy applies to research articles and conference proceedings submitted on or after 1 April 2022, and to longform publications (monographs, book chapters and edited collections) published on or after 1 January 2024.

The University Library Research Services team manages the UKRI open access block grant (OABG) awarded to the University, and are available to deliver college, school, departmental or research group OA policy briefings on request.

If you have any initial questions about the block grant, compliance requirements for research articles, compliant publishing routes, and transitional agreements with publishers, contact the team on openaccess@leicester.ac.uk.

How to comply

From 1 April 2022 all UKRI funded in-scope peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN must be made immediately open access. This includes review articles, including those that have been invited or commissioned.

• The article must be available immediately on publication (no embargo)
• The article must have a CC-BY license (unless you have secured special permission for a CC-BY-ND license from UKRI)
• The article must include a data access statement [see Annex 1, point 9] explaining how people can access the data your paper is based on

Routes to publish compliantly

Route 1

Publish open access via a journal or publishing platform that makes the Version of Record (VoR) immediately available on its website.

Route 2

Publish closed access in a subscription journal and deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) or (Version of Record if permitted by the publisher) into a compliant repository.

University of Leicester researchers should deposit into Figshare Leicester Research Archive via IRIS as soon as possible after article acceptance. The deposited manuscript must be made open access immediately on publication without an embargo period.

In addition, biomedical articles which acknowledge funding from Biotechnology and Biomedical Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) or Medical Research Council (MRC) are required to be archived in Europe PMC (Pubmed Central). 

Paying for article processing charges from the UKRI open access block grant

You can apply for funds to have your article processing charge (APC) paid from our UKRI OA block grant if you are:

• Publishing in a fully open access journal or platform, or
• Publishing in a hybrid (subscription) journal which has been designated as a transformative journal

University of Leicester and transitional agreements

The University of Leicester has signed up to several transitional agreements with publishers, and in the majority of cases this permits University of Leicester corresponding authors to publish open access, with no author-side costs. Publishing in journals covered by these transitional agreements is compliant with UKRI OA policy.

Use the Jisc journal checker tool to see which publishing options are aligned with UKRI OA policy. As this tool is still under development we recommend that you contact openaccess@leicester.ac.uk to check the journal's eligibility.