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 UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) 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?

Acknowledge your UKRI funding by including the name of the funding agency and the grant number. See UKRI's guidance on acknowledging funding.
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.
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.

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

Rights retention for subscription journals

If your journal does not comply through Gold/fully open access, use rights retention. Under UCL’s updated Publications Policy, authors publishing in subscription journals outside UCL’s transformative agreements can still meet UKRI's requirements:

Accepted manuscripts can be made open access immediately in UCL Discovery, without an embargo, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY).
Upload the accepted manuscript to UCL’s Research Publications Service (RPS) on or before publication. BBSRC and MRC funded manuscripts must also be uploaded to Europe PMC.
Research degree students publishing without a UCL staff co-author are not currently covered by rights retention. They must include the required statement at submission, as set out in the Rights Retention Support Pages.

If you have any queries about rights retention or your journal's policy, contact UCL's Open Access Team for advice.