Open Research

From January 1 2021 all research articles and their underlying data which arise from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funding, in whole or in part, must be made freely available at the time of publication through placement in a publicly available repository, and openly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) or equivalent terms to allow others to build on and reuse the research.

You can use the Journal Checker Tool to see if your chosen journal complies with the Foundation's open access requirements. 

For manuscripts submitted on or after January 1, 2021, the Foundation will only pay fees to fully Open Access journals or journals which have committed to fully transition to Open Access.

If you receive an invoice for open access fees that are necessary to comply with these requirements, don’t pay it. Instead, forward it to openaccess@gatesfoundation.org. Contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk if you are not sure how to proceed.

See their Open Access Policy for further information.

The minimum requirement is that papers are posted on Europe PubMed Central with a maximum six month embargo.

Blood Cancer UK will pay article processing charges but these are capped at £2,000 which must include any value added tax.

Award holders with papers accepted acknowledging Blood Cancer UK awards should email research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk. Please confirm:

• The name of the journal or publication
• The title of the article
• That you have included the funder and award details in the manuscript, and
• That you have included a statement, where applicable, on how underlying research materials, such as data, can be accessed.

Ideally, provided a PDF of your manuscript, confirming if it is the agreed final text or whether revisions are expected, and this will allow the Open Access service to check some of the above details for you.

Breast Cancer Now left the Charity Open Access Fund in September 2016.  They require deposit of manuscripts in Europe PubMed Central (PMC) within 12 months of publication.  They allow grant funds to be used for open access costs.

For further information please read their Open Access Policy. 

Please email research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk as soon as you are notified that a article or conference proceeding has been accepted and we will guide you through the open access process.  

The British Heart Foundation supports immediate, unrestricted (gold) open access to primary research articles and non-commissioned reviews.

All Grantholders must comply with the BHF Policy on Open Access, and should ensure that an electronic copy of each primary research paper or non-commissioned review funded wholly or in part by us is made freely available in Europe PubMed Central as soon as possible and no later than 6 months after publication.

In the case of immediate open access, authors and publishers should license research papers using the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY 4.0).

British Heart Foundation (BHF) provide a grant each year to the University. This grant is finite, so please check in advance before committing to any costs.

Contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk on acceptance (or submission if there are mandatory costs/the publisher requires committment to costs at this stage) of your manuscript and we will advise on open access options. In many cases we will be able to share the manuscript via Enlighten or other repository services such as Europe PMC.

Please confirm:

• The name of the journal or publication
• The title of the article
• That you have included the funder and award details in the manuscript, and
• That you have included a statement, where applicable, on how underlying research materials, such as data, can be accessed.

Ideally, provided a PDF of your manuscript, confirming if it is the agreed final text or whether revisions are expected, and this will allow the Open Access service to check some of the above details for you.

For more information, see the BHF Open Access policy.

CRUK have announced a new open access policy which will come into effect for articles accepted for publication on or after 1^st January 2022.

CRUK now require immediate open access for all primary research articles and will no longer accept embargo periods of up to 6 months.

Review papers (except for meta analyses), editorials, commentaries, books / chapters and monographs are not included in the policy. 

CRUK will continue to provide funds to the University of Glasgow to pay for open access should that be necessary. Please continue to contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk on acceptance and we will advise accordingly.

When emailing us, please confirm:

• The name of the journal or publication
• The title of the article
• That you have included the funder and award details in the manuscript, and
• That you have included a statement, where applicable, on how underlying research materials, such as data, can be accessed.

Ideally, provided a PDF of your manuscript, confirming if it is the agreed final text or whether revisions are expected, and this will allow the Open Access service to check some of the above details for you.

See the CRUK Open Access policy for more information.

Authors are also expected to provide the CRUK Press Team will details of all publications arising from grants AT THE TIME OF SUBMISSION. This information can be submitted using the online manuscript submission form. 

Current CSO policy

This policy applies to all peer-reviewed research articles, including reviews not commissioned by publishers, submitted for publication on or after 1 June 2022 that arise from CSO grants and CSO fellowships.

• Articles must be immediately, freely and openly accessible to all.
• The most up to date Version of Record or the Author Accepted Manuscript of in-scope articles must be made freely available through Europe PMC by the official final publication date, without any embargo period.
• CSO will pay open access fees such as an article processing charge (APC) required by a publisher for articles that stem from a CSO award. This funding is provided on the basis that the publisher makes the Version of Record freely available on the publishing journal platform at the time of publication AND deposits the Version of Record in PMC to allow that content to be shared with Europe PMC also at the time of publication.
• These requirements should not prevent researchers from also depositing a copy in their institutional or another subject based repository.
• Peer reviewed articles from CSO grants and Fellowships must give appropriate acknowledgement of CSO using the unique award identifier in the funding or acknowledgement section of the manuscript.
• All articles that acknowledge CSO as a funder should be published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) licence to ensure maximum impact. This permits all users of CSO-funded articles to disseminate and build upon the material for any purpose without further permission or fees being required.

Funding will be limited to £8,000 per standard CSO committee grant or Fellowship and must be applied for within 18 months of financial reconciliation of the grant. If we are not the only funder acknowledged on the paper then the PI must confirm we are the majority funder or explain why the application for funds is being sent to CSO.

Any exceptions to the CC BY licence must be applied for in advance with justifications.

Please email research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk  when your publication is accepted and we will check if CSO will pay the open access costs.

Open Access requirements for articles acknowledging European funding depend on the Grant or Work Programme the research is funded from.  

FP9 - Horizon Europe (2021 - 2027)

The requirements are the same for European Commission and European Research Council funding. Marie Sklodowski-Curie Action awards are covered by the European Commission requirements for open access.

Under Horizon Europe, you must ensure open access to all peer-reviewed scientific publications relating to its results. The detailed legal requirements on open access to publications are contained in article 17 of the Model Grant Agreement. 

In alignment with Plan S, Horizon Europe requires all peer-reviewed research and underlying data sets, funded in whole or in part by them, to be: 

• made freely available at the time of publication, with unrestricted access and reuse
• openly licenced under a CC BY licence (long-form outputs and monographs may us a CC-BY-NC or ND licence.

Self-deposit (green route) and paid-for open access (gold route) are both acceptable to Horizon Europe.

If taking the green route, there must be no embargo period. 

Gold open access charges for papers in fully open access journals can be paid from Horizon Europe grants, provided they are incurred during the duration of the project. Open Research Europe is available as a publishing platform for European-funded work both during and after the end of the grant. Gold open access charges for papers in subscription/hybrid journals are not eligible for funding.

Authors are instructed to ensure they retain sufficient intellectual property rights to comply with their open access obligations. To facilitate this, authors are advised to include the following statement in their manuscript at the time of submission: “This work was funded by the Εuropean Union under the Horizon Europe grant [grant number]. As set out in the Grant Agreement, beneficiaries must ensure that at the latest at the time of publication, open access is provided via a trusted repository to the published version or the final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication under the latest available version of the Creative Commons Attribution International Public Licence (CC BY) or a licence with equivalent rights. CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND or equivalent licenses could be applied to long-text formats.”

Detailed information about the European Commission Horizon Europe requirements are available in the Programme Guide.

Detailed information about the European Research Council Horizon Europe requirements are available here.

FP8 - Horizon 2020 (2014 - 2020)

The requirements are the same for European Commission and European Research Council funding. Marie Sklodowski-Curie Action awards are covered by the European Commission requirements for open access.

Under Horizon 2020, you must ensure open access to all peer-reviewed scientific publications relating to its results. The detailed legal requirements on open access to publications are contained in article 29.2 of the Model Grant Agreement. 

Researchers (beneficiaries) must ensure open access to all peer-reviewed publications, either by publishing open access in a journal or publishing platform, or by self-archiving a version of the work. 

If taking the self-archiving route, any embargo period must be shorter than 6 months (12 months for arts and social sciences subjects).

If taking the gold route, publication costs can be charged to the grant if incurred during the life of the grant. If costs are incurred after the grant has ended there are no funds available to cover them. If taking the gold route, it is also necessary to deposit your article in a repository (e.g. Enlighten, Europe PubMed or arXiv) to ensure compliance with the H2020 open access policy.

A CC-BY licence is encouraged but not mandated.

Detailed information about European Commission Horizon 2020 requirements are available here.

Detailed information about the European Research Council Horizon 2020 requirements are available here.

FP7 (2007 - 2013) - European Commission

In this round of funding the European Commission introduced open access requirements in seven areas of research (energy, environment, health, information and communication technologies [only cognitive systems, interaction, and robotics], research infrastructures [only e-infrastructures], science in society, and socioeconomic sciences and humanities).

The pilot was based on green (self-archiving) open access, however there was the opportunity for gold (paid-for) open access if the costs were incurred during the life of the FP7 project.

If the gold route was taken, a CC-BY licence was required.

If the green route is taken, a 6 month embargo period was permitted (12 months for social sciences and humanities topics). Authors could use an institutional or subject-based repository.

More information on this scheme can be found here.

FP7 (2007 - 2013) - European Research Council

In this round of funding, the ERC supported the principle of open access to the published outputs of research. 

Authors were requested to self-deposit a copy of an output via the green route. A 6 month embargo period was permitted (12 months for social sciences and humanities topics).

Authors were strongly encouraged to use discipline-specific repositories, but if there was no appropriate discipline-specific repository available, authors could use institutional repositories or general repositories. 

More information on this scheme can be found here and here.

Modifications to grant agreements for ALL FUNDING STREAMS

Occasionally grant agreements for European funding are modified from the original model agreements. If you think this might be the case for your European funding, please check the terms of your funding to determine what the open access obligations are for your work. Your local project coordinator or the Oversees Team should be able to help with this.

Open access payment is an allowable expense if incurred during the project timeframe. Please read their Open Access publishing policy.  

New NIHR Open Access policy (for articles accepted for publication on or after 1st June 2022)

Additional guidance on the implementation of this policy can be found here.

All peer-reviewed research articles, including reviews not commissioned by publishers and conference papers must be made immediately open access under an open licence. 

There is a checklist available to help authors comply with the policy. An FAQ will also be available through this link. 

NIHR will pay reasonable fees required by a publisher to effect publication in line with the criteria of the NIHR open access policy.

Grant holders with awards issued before 1st June 2022 should use the open access budget included in their overall research costs to pay for open access for articles.

Grant holders with awards issued after 1st June 2022 will be provided with an 'open access funding envelope' from which they can cover the costs of open access for a period extending to two years beyond the end point of their research funding.

All grant holders can apply for additional open access funds once they have exhausted their funding envelope or the open access budget in their original award.

Please contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk if you need any more guidance on open access for NIHR-funded articles.

The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication. 

Publication costs, including author fees, may be charged to NIH grants and contracts provided the conditions outlined in their policy are met. See D3 here: https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#810

Parkinson's UK requires that papers acknowledging its awards are deposited in Europe PMC with a maximum six month embargo from the date of publication. The charity encourages grant applicants to include open access costs in the finance schedule of research grant applications.

Parkinson's UK grantholders can publish any Parkinson’s UK research for free on AMRC Open Research, including research articles, data and software articles, systematic reviews, and study protocols. All articles benefit from rapid publication, transparent peer review and editorial guidance on making all source data openly available.

The Parkinson's UK open access policy can be found here: https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/research/open-access-publishing-researchers

If you are preparing a grant application to Parkinson's UK and wish to include open access costs, you can contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk for advice.

Award holders with papers accepted acknowledging Parkinson's UK awards should email research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk. Please confirm:

• The name of the journal or publication
• The title of the article
• That you have included the funder and award details in the manuscript, and
• That you have included a statement, where applicable, on how underlying research materials, such as data, can be accessed.

Ideally, provided a PDF of your manuscript, confirming if it is the agreed final text or whether revisions are expected, and this will allow the Open Access service to check some of the above details for you.

Articles and Conference Proceedings Submitted from 1st April 2022

This video (8 mins) introduces the new UKRI policy:

The UKRI policy and frequently asked questions can be viewed at: UK Research and Innovation Open Access Policy. 

A list of UKRI funders can be found here. 

UKRI Open Access Policy from 1st April 2022  

Contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk if you have questions.

Immediate open access will be required for peer-reviewed research articles, including reviews and conference papers in journals or conference proceedings with an ISSN. This applies to articles submitted from 1st April 2022. A CC-BY licence will be required.  

This can be achieved in two ways:  

• A version of record being free and unrestricted to view and download on the publisher site.  
• An accepted version (or the published version, also known as the Version of Record, if permitted) being deposited on a repository at the time of final publication. The text must be free and unrestricted to view and download. For this route submissions must include the following text in the funding acknowledgement section of the manuscript and cover letter/note accompanying the submission:   

‘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’   

Biomedical articles funded by MRC and BBSRC must continue to be deposited in Europe Pubmed Central. Publishers often do this on behalf of authors but sometimes authors need to arrange this themselves.   

UKRI require publicly funded research data to be made openly available with as few restrictions as possible.  In-scope research articles must include a Data Access Statement, even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible.  

Under the new Open Access Policy, page and colour charges are not permitted to be paid from the block grant. 

Full details of the policy including definitions and exceptions: UKRI Open Access Policy 2022  

Any questions?  Contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk. 

Exceptions to the new UKRI OA policy 

A Creative Commons No-Derivatives (CC BY-ND) licence may be permitted by exception.  Authors will need to explain why they are applying for this exception.  A publisher not offering CC BY is not an acceptable reason. The exception application form for a no-derivatives licence is available here.

UKRI licensing requirements do not apply to any materials included within a research article that are provided by third-party copyright holders. Articles published CC-BY or CC-BY-ND can include third-party materials (e.g., images, photographs, maps) that are subject to a more restrictive licence.   

Open access costs for hybrid journals will not be an allowable cost against future UKRI OA grants unless the journal is covered by a ‘transitional’ agreement. Authors can of course choose to pay open access fees for hybrid journals from other sources or to deposit in a repository with no embargo.   

Pre-prints are out of scope of the policy, but UKRI encourages use of pre-prints and reserves the right to ensure use of pre-prints in the context of emergencies.   

Previous UKRI Policy - for articles and conference proceedings submitted before 1st April 2022

The University holds a block grant from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to cover open access costs. 

The fund can only be used where it is necessary to pay the publisher to comply with funder requirements and where the publisher offers a compliant method to do so.  Costs will only be paid where the publisher offers a CC-BY licence.  

Some publishers have mandatory charges such as page charges.  These can be covered by the fund where the publisher will also offer a CC-BY licence.  The fund is not used to pay optional costs such as cover or print costs.  

It should not be assumed that all costs for papers acknowledging UKRI funders can be covered.  

Contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk at acceptance, and we can confirm if the article processing charge will be covered by the block grant or discuss alternative routes to open access that can be used to comply with UKRI terms. If you have arranged a waiver or a third party is paying the fee, please let us know. 

Eligibility 

The University will allocate funds to pay article processing charges (APCs) for papers acknowledging UKRI awards held at the University of Glasgow where:  

• There is sufficient funding in the central budget and an APC must be paid as there is no other method to make the paper open access to comply with funder terms, e.g., where publishers place an embargo on making a paper freely available and this embargo is longer than acceptable to the funder.  Where an APC has been paid, re-use rights must be unrestricted. Typically, this is indicated by a CC-BY licence.   
• The article is accepted to a fully open access journal and if the publication fee is not paid the article will not be published.  
• The fund may be used to support the payment of other mandatory article charges, such as page charges where we are paying the open access fee.   

Do not assume that all costs will be funded. The funds are finite and sometimes it is not necessary to pay to comply with funders’ requirements. Contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk when a paper is accepted, and we will confirm if payment is necessary and possible. 

Long-form Publications Open Access Policy (from 2024) 

Final accepted version or published version must be free to view and download via publisher site or repository within 12 months of publication. CC-BY preferred. NC and ND permitted.   

Self-archiving of an accepted version requires a link to the Version of Record. It should be made clear that the accepted version is not the final version.   

Further information in Books Acknowledging UKRI Awards

The open access policy for Versus Arthritis applies to original research papers only.

The minimum requirement is that the paper is available on Europe PMC with a maximum 6 month embargo.

If they wish to use the gold route award holders should apply to the funder for open access costs. See the Open Access guidelines. 

Award holders with papers accepted acknowledging Versus Arthritis awards should email research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk. Please confirm:

• The name of the journal or publication
• The title of the article
• That you have included the funder and award details in the manuscript, and
• That you have included a statement, where applicable, on how underlying research materials, such as data, can be accessed.

Ideally, provided a PDF of your manuscript, confirming if it is the agreed final text or whether revisions are expected, and this will allow the Open Access service to check some of the above details for you.

Articles Submitted from 1st January 2021

Original research articles must be made freely available via PubMed Central by the official final publication date. This article must be published with a CC-BY licence unless a CC-BY-ND licence is explicitly agreed with Wellcome Trust. 

Researchers should use the Version of Record or Author Accepted Manuscript to comply with the policy, where this is possible and depending on the publishing options available to them. Wellcome allows researchers to use a CC BY licensed preprint as a version of a research article to comply with the policy, where they can’t make either the Version of Record or the Accepted Manuscript compliant.  If using a preprint to ensure compliance, researchers must post it to a preprint server indexed by Europe PMC before final publication of the paper. 

You can use the form on this page Wellcome Trust Applying for a No-Derivatives Licence to request an exception.

The new policy only applies to original research papers where the main purpose of the article type is to report original research.  Other manuscript types published within a journal which may include some new data or research findings are not required to be made open access. 

All grantholders must automatically grant a CC-BY licence to author accepted manuscripts.    They must include the following statement on all submissions of original research to peer-reviewed journals: 

'This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.' 

This means that where the article is not eligible for open access funding the author can upload the accepted version to Europe PMC to comply with the policy.   Articles submitted via this method are then passed to Pubmed Central.

Funding is only available to cover article processing charges for fully open access journals except where the journal is listed as transforming to open access.

Please note that Wellcome will only fund publication costs in fully open access journals from 1 January 2025 onwards.

The open access team research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk  can check if your preferred journal complies, or you can check yourself using the Plan S journal checker tool.   Note that this can sometimes be out of date or suggest your organisation will pay when we may not be able to pay so please contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk if you are unsure of what it means or if you want to check if the University can pay.

Authors are also encouraged to share preprints using CC-BY.  Where there is a significant public health benefit to preprints being shared, such as a disease outbreak, Wellcome Trust require the posting of preprints. 

Wellcome make Wellcome Open Research available to funded researchers as a rapid open access publishing platform for a broad range of Wellcome-funded research. Articles published on this platform will meet the Wellcome open access requirements. 

For more information, see the full policy.

Books and Book Chapters

Wellcome Trust require open access to books and book chapters.  Visit the section on this page Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy for details of what is required, and read below how the University can help you with this.

What help is available and what must you do?

The University of Glasgow's Open Access service (research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk) can advise you on meeting these requirements.

The Open Access team manage Wellcome Trust funds to help you meet Open Access costs associated with articles, where a payment is needed to comply with these requirements. Note that the Wellcome Trust Open Access fund will only pay the Open Access costs.

If there are costs for page, colour or supplemental services there is no central funding available for these and local funds would need to be found.  Some award holders may have flexible funding allowances or specific budget lines for publication costs from earlier grants that can be used for these costs.  Flexible funding allowance was stopped by Wellcome Trust for applications received from March 2019 and Wellcome no longer allow publication costs to be included in grant applications.

Please email research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk if you have had an article accepted for publication to confirm:

• The name of the journal or publication
• The title of the article
• That you have included the funder and award details in the manuscript, and
• That you have included a statement, where applicable, on how underlying research materials, such as data, can be accessed.

Ideally, provide a PDF or word copy of your manuscript, confirming if it is the agreed final text or whether revisions are expected. This will allow the Open Access service to check some of the above details for you.