Open Research

Wellcome Trust routinely pay open access costs for books and book chapters.  If you acknowledge a Wellcome Trust award in your book, please notify research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk before accepting any costs relating to open access.  

Provide details of the publication (title, authors/editors, publisher, ISBN) and the funders’ reference numbers for any awards you acknowledge. Please also provide the open access fee if you know it. We will contact the Wellcome Trust on your behalf to check for confirmation that they will cover the cost of open access publication.   

Monographs must be made available from NCBI Bookshelf and Europe PMC within six months of the publisher’s official date of final publication. Wellcome has an Open Access Monograph and Book Chapter Deposit Form to be used for inclusion. 

For more information, see the Wellcome Trust open access policy. 

UKRI require books and book chapters published on or after 1 January 2024 to be free to view, and download, from a website within 12 months of publication. 

This can be achieved by:

• Depositing the accepted version in a repository 

OR

• Making the published version freely available on the publisher website

A CC BY licence is preferred particularly if costs are being covered by UKRI.

Funding is available for longform publications that are published within seven years of the end of the grant acknowledged.  If you have a case for exceptional circumstances this might be considered.

The maximum funding including VAT is: 

Book Processing Charge £10,000 

Chapter Processing Charge £1000 

Alternative funding models charge £6,000 for first output, £3,000 for subsequent outputs in the same outlet.  

It is possible to claim up to £2,000 towards rights clearance within the maximum levels of funding.

It is not allowable to top up from research grants.  If research grants explicity include costs for open access to longform publications these must be used first before applying to the fund.  

If costs exceed the maximum options include:

Top up the funding from local sources (not UKRI grants) 

Discuss options to share the accepted manuscript open access within 12 months of publication with the publisher.

Consider if an exemption applies.

The period until September 2024 will be a bedding in period and no sanctions will be applied during this period.

Some funding may be available for rights clearance costs.  However these costs can still be included in grant applications.

There will be a two stage process to apply for funding meaning that authors can ask for funds in advance of acceptance. 

Stage 1 -  From 28th November 2023 research organisations can submit applications for funding.  A publication contract does not have to be in place at this stage.

Stage 2 -  From January 2024 research organisations will be able to recover costs for publications that UKRI has agreed to fund.

Please contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk to apply for funding.

Read more here UKRI Open Access for Books Process.

UKRI Open Access Policy: Frequently Asked Questions.

Authors should first read the guidance in the UKRI Open Access Policy to check if their long form output is in scope. 

There are some exemptions e.g:

• If you already signed a contract with a publisher before 1st January 2024 and it does not facilitate open access then you will not require to be compliant.
• Trade books
• The output arises from a UKRI training grant.

Third-party content within copyright should only be included under the terms that the rightsholder has allowed.  UKRI have provided some guidance on managing copyright under UKRI policy.  If you are permitted to re-use a piece of content in your publication, it is possible to include it under a different licence or under an 'all rights reserved' basis.  There is a exemption available where reuse permissions are not obtained and a suitable alternative is not available.  Please allow time to deal with copyright.

Some guidance on exemptions is available in the UKRI Open Access Policy annex 3.

The process for applying exemptions is self managed and authors should work with research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk to make and record a decision.

Open access requirements may differ depending on the Grant or Work programme the research is funded from. 

Under the Horizon Europe ERC Work Programme, you must ensure open access to monographs and book chapters at the latest at the time of publication. Publication fees in full open access venues are in principle eligible for reimbursement: the costs must be occurred during the lifetime of the grant, and you must comply to other grant conditions.  

Costs for open access costs under Horizon 2020 are eligible if incurred during the lifetime of the project, provided they are in line with the general cost eligibility criteria. 

For more details, see ERC’s Open Access Information.  

The University is a partner in the Scottish Universities Press.

Academics at Scottish higher education institutes can submit a proposal.

https://www.sup.ac.uk/submit-a-monograph-proposal

As a proof of concept, the University has set aside some funds to pay for open access books published by the Scottish Universities Press in the first few years.  If you are a member of staff or student at Glasgow contact us to find out if your submission might benefit from this.

Contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk 

The University of Glasgow is represented on the management and editorial board.

A short video of the Scottish Universities Open Access Press initiative is available on YouTube.

The University of Glasgow subscribes to the Open Book Publishers Library Membership Programme.    

In some cases, this tool has been used to make previously out of print books available online in a new edition.   

Book publishing charges are not mandated. Books are not accepted or rejected on the basis of ability to pay.  Authors are encouraged to try to get grants to cover costs of publication where possible.   

The OAPEN Foundation has launched a new open access (OA) books toolkit  for researchers and academic book authors. The toolkit is a free-to-access, stakeholder-agnostic resource that aims to help authors better understand OA for books, increase trust in OA book publishing, provide reliable and easy-to-find answers to questions from authors, and to provide guidance on the process of publishing an OA book.    

The toolkit was created in collaboration with Springer Nature and The University of Glasgow and has been written by a global and diverse group of stakeholders from the academic community and scholarly communications organisations.