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. 

For books published on or after 1 January 2024, UKRI will require the author accepted version or published version to be free to view and download via the publisher site, or a repository, within 12 months of publication. A CC BY licence is preferred but other licences may be permitted.

There will be a two stage process to apply for funding meaning that authors can ask for funds in advance of acceptance.  Read more here UKRI Open Access for Books Process. Authors will need to contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk to apply for funding.

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

There is also some UKRI guidance for authors.

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 (though consideration may be given to supporting the costs)

Third-party content within copyright should only be included under the terms that the rightsholder has allowed.  If this prohibits open access publication.

Some guidance on the 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.

Further details on funding and notification of exemptions are expected to be available Autumn 2023.

If you are currently applying for a research grant and expect to publish a monograph, book chapter or edited collection between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2024, you may include open access costs in your grant application, if publication is expected to happen during the lifetime of your award. Otherwise, you should wait to apply to the dedicated open access fund launching in Autumn 2023.

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

Contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk if you are looking for advice on funding for publication costs with the Scottish Universities Press.

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.