The new UKRI policy on Open Access comes into effect on 1st April 2022. Detailed information is available on our UKRI Open Access Policy webpage, but the following scenarios maybe of help in highlighting some practical effects of the policy, and on publishing Open Access in general. The key changes contained in the new policy can be summarised as:

• Articles must be made available immediately upon publication – embargoes are no longer permitted
• A Creative Commons Attribution  or CC-BY licence must be applied to the Version of Record and the Author Accepted Manuscript (unless an exception is granted)
• A Data Access Statement must be included
• A Rights Management Statement must be included
• Page and colour charges cannot be charged to the block grant

It is important to realise that these are only a few of many possible scenarios, but support is available from the LLC’s Research services team via email at discovery@dundee.ac.uk , and researchers are strongly encouraged to contact the team before submitting their manuscripts to a journal to check that they can comply with their funder’s requirements.

My research is funded by the Wellcome Trust, and I want to publish in ACS Chemical Biology. Can I do so?

Although the Wellcome Trust provides the university with a block grant to support open access publication, this fund comes with certain conditions. In this case, we cannot use Wellcome Trust Block Grant funds to pay for Open Access publishing costs. Instead, there are two options:

(a) Deposit your final Author’s Accepted Manuscript in an Institutional and / or Subject repository (in this instance, the Discovery Research Portal and Europe PMC), with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence and no embargo period. This will require the following statement to be included in the acknowledgements section of your manuscript, as well as in your accompanying letter to the publisher:

‘This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number xxxxx]. 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.’

(b) Arrange for the cost of publishing open access to be paid from the university’s Institutional Open Access Fund. Please note that there is significant pressure on this fund, and its use to cross-subsidise publication costs from funders who already provide Open Access Block Grants is discouraged.

My research is funded by ESRC, and I wish to publish in the British Journal of Educational Studies. Can I do so?

Yes, ESRC adheres to the new UKRI Policy on Open Access, and the journal is published by Taylor & Francis, with whom the university has concluded a Transformative Agreement. For a list of publishers with whom we have signed such agreements, refer to our LibGuide on the Read and Publish Agreements at the University of Dundee

My research is funded by the NHS, and I wish to publish in BMJ Open. Can I do so?

Yes. Whilst currently the NHS does not require research to be published open access, BMJ Open is an open access only journal, which requires payment of an Article Processing Charge before publication. This cost will be met from the university’s Institutional Open Access Fund.

My research is jointly funded by the Chief Scientist Office and the Medical Research Council, and I wish to publish in Nature Genetics. What do I have to do?

In instances where more than one funder is involved, researchers should comply with the most stringent funder requirements on open access publication, in this case the MRC’s. In this instance, we would be able to use the UKRI Open Access Block Grant, as well as applying for support from CSO to pay the Article Processing Charge for this paper. Nature Genetics, published by Springer Nature qualifies as a Transformative Journal, i.e., a subscription/hybrid journal that is committed to transitioning to a fully OA journal.