Open Access - Deposits & Costs

Open Access Costs

UCL has a number of new “transformative agreements” with Wiley, Springer, Sage, IOP, RSC and some smaller society publishers. These agreements allow most or all UCL corresponding authors, regardless of funding, to publish their papers open access. The costs are funded by an overall UCL payment covering subscriptions and open access. Follow the steps below, before you submit a paper, to benefit from these agreements.

1. See whether UCL has a transformative agreement with your publisher.
2. If UCL has a transformative agreement, make sure you check the relevant publisher terms and instructions to find out whether your paper is eligible and how to take advantage of the agreement.
3. If your publication is not covered by a transformative agreement, see our "Can UCL pay my Gold open access costs?" FAQ.*
4. If your publication is not eligible for funding, upload it to RPS (and Europe PubMed Central, for MRC-funded papers) within 3 months of first online publication.

* Funding is still available for:

• Papers in fully open access journals that charge a mandatory fee to publish (e.g. PLOS, BioMed Central, Nature Communications), funded by a UCL UK Research Council (UKRI) or Wellcome grant.
• Papers funded by a UCL Wellcome grant in subscription journals (known as ‘hybrid’ open access, where a one-off payment unlocks otherwise paywalled content), submitted on or before 31 December 2020.
• Papers funded by a UCL UK Research Council (UKRI) grant where the publisher’s embargo on making the manuscript open access in a repository is too long (details in point 1 here), where the invoice is received on or before 31 March 2021. MRC units have different arrangements.
• Most mandatory publication charges for UK Research Council-funded papers, where the invoice is received on or before 31 March 2021.
• Papers with a UCL corresponding author who’s a full (not honorary or visiting) member of staff, or a UCL student, in fully open access journals, where funding is not available from the research funder. The invoice must be received on or before 30 June 2020. Funding beyond this has not yet been announced, so authors are advised to seek alternative funds where appropriate.
   

UKRI is consulting on its proposed new open access policy. We expect the new policy to be announced later this year.

The Wellcome’s new open access policy applies to papers submitted from 1 January 2021.

See our UK Research Council (UKRI) and Wellcome webpages for more information.

Step-by-step instructions and contact details for the Open Access Team are here.