Papers funded in whole or in part by Versus Arthritis must meet Versus Arthritis's open access requirements. Find out how to comply, and what funding is available.
The Versus Arthritis open access policy applies to original research papers funded by Versus Arthritis. These outputs must be made open access in Europe PMC within six months of publication. The policy does not apply to editorials, letters, reviews, scholarly monographs, conference proceedings or book chapters.
Complying with the policy
Gold open access
- Journals in UCL's transformative agreements are 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 compliant. Some fully open access journals are included in UCL's agreements (see above). If your journal is not included in an agreement, it may be eligible for funding via UCL's Open Access Team if it also acknowledges UCL-held Wellcome Trust, UK Research Council (UKRI), CRUK and/or BHF funds.
For other articles, see the Versus Arthritis open access policy and funding arrangements. While certain papers in fully open access journals may be eligible for UCL's central open access funding (see the Unfunded publications section of our Open access funding page), authors should approach Versus Arthritis in the first instance.
Where Versus Arthritis pays open access charges, it requires the CC BY licence.
Green open access
UCL's updated Publications Policy allows authors publishing in subscription journals not in UCL's transformative agreements to make their articles open access in UCL Discovery and Europe PMC without an embargo, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY). Follow the steps on our UCL Publications Policy: actions for authors page, adding a rights retention statement to your paper when you submit, and uploading your accepted manuscript to UCL’s Research Publications Service (RPS) on or before publication. You also need to upload the accepted mansucript to Europe PMC, with a 0 embargo. See the UCL Publications Policy support pages for more information.
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. Your article can meet the Versus Arthritis open access requirements provided that the journal's embargo on Green open access is no longer than six months.