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Information on UCL's Open Access policy, Research Data policy, and advice for authors on retaining rights to their work.
UCL Open Access Policy
UCL's policy is that the accepted manuscript of all outputs must be uploaded to UCL's Research Publications Service (RPS). This will make them compliant with the REF open access policy. Manuscripts will be made open access through UCL Discovery, UCL's institutional repository, according to the publisher's copyright permissions (usually after a delay period).
Author's rights in research outputs
Open access maximises the efficacy and utility of publicly-funded research. It is key to communicating and sharing research outcomes as part of the UCL 2034 strategy.
Publishing agreements generally place restrictions on authors’ use of their own published research, including on open access. Unless an output is published Gold open access, the publisher will usually require the author to sign an exclusive publishing agreement that specifies when, and how, the author’s accepted manuscript can be made open access in an institutional or subject repository such as UCL Discovery.
The cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy aims to enable authors to retain sufficient intellectual property rights in their work to make their accepted manuscript open access at the time of publication under a CC BY licence. A number of research funders, including the Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils (UKRI) and Horizon Europe have adopted rights retention or a similar policy, as have some universities.
To use rights retention, authors include a statement when they submit that indicates to the publisher that they have applied a CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript. When they deposit their accepted manuscript in their institution’s or funder’s repository after acceptance, it is made open access under the CC BY licence.
UCL supports the principle of immediate open access to research outputs, and provides advice and guidance to authors who wish to retain their rights, either through their funder’s rights retention policy or independently. Rights retention resources, including templates for discussions with publishers, are available on the cOAlition S rights retention webpages. Authors wanting to retain their rights, whose funder has adopted a rights retention policy, or who are co-authors on a paper covered by another university’s rights retention policy, are encouraged to contact UCL’s Open Access Team for further information and guidance.