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UKRI research papers: what do I need to do?

This page explains what steps researchers should take to make their articles and conference papers open access, in accordance with URKI requirements.

To comply with the UKRI open access policy, peer-reviewed research articles, reviews, and conference papers (published in a proceedings with an ISSN number) must be open access immediately upon publication, with the CC BY licence (or CC BY-ND by exception). If you need assistance with any of the steps below, check our UKRI open access FAQ, or contact UCL's Open Access Team. 

What do I need to do?

  1. Acknowledge your UKRI funding by including the name of the funding agency and the grant number. See UKRI's guidance on acknowledging funding.
  2. Include a Data Access Statement in your research paper. This is required even where there is no data associated with the article, or data is inaccessible. Further guidance is provided in Annex 1 of the UKRI open access policy.
  3. Publish Gold/fully open access
    Journals in UCL's transformative agreements are UKRI compliant. To use the agreements, the article's corresponding author must be at UCL. Proceed with submission, following the links to publisher instructions in the list of journals in UCL's agreements, and choose CC BY when accepted for publication.

    Journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals are UKRI compliant. Some fully open access journals are included in UCL's agreements (if so, see above), but if they are not, request funding by completing this form.

If your journal does not comply through Gold/fully open access, use rights retention: include UKRI's required text on rights retention (see below) in your submission, then upload your accepted manuscript to RPS so that it is available in UCL Discovery immediately upon publication. Contact the Open Access Team after uploading your manuscript and alert them that it is UKRI funded. If the work is funded by BBSRC or MRC, the mansucript must also be uploaded to Europe PMC.

If you have any queries about rights retention or your journal's policy, or if your journal refuses to allow you to apply the CC BY licence to your accepted manuscript, contact UCL's Open Access Team for advice. You should avoid signing a contract that applies an embargo period to the accepted manuscript and does not allow it to be made available under a CC BY licence.

Rights retention statement

Submissions that will not be published Gold open access must include UKRI's required text on rights retention, which enables you make your manuscript available in an open access repository, with a CC BY licence, upon publication. Include this text in the funding acknowledgement section and in any cover letter or note accompanying the submission:

For the purpose of open access, the author(s) 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.