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Discover how the UCL Publications Policy works, requirements for UCL researchers, and the benefits of rights retention.
UCL's updated Publications Policy came into effect on 08 April 2025. The policy allows UCL to make scholarly articles and other outputs available as widely and equitably as possible, while simplifying open access for UCL staff.
Against a background of continuing financial pressure in the scholarly communications ecosystem, and concerns about its long-term sustainability, the policy empowers authors to retain their intellectual property in their research outputs, ensures that their outputs can be made openly available for the public good, and supports efforts to develop a more equitable and inclusive publishing landscape.
Rights retention
The policy builds on the provisions of the UCL Intellectual Property (IP) Policy, under which in most cases UCL staff own the copyright in scholarly materials created in the course of their duties, while UCL retains a licence to use these materials for academic and research purposes. This is known as rights retention. Having notified publishers of UCL's pre-existing licence, UCL will make accepted manuscripts authored or co-authored by UCL staff members (including honorary staff) open access without an embargo in UCL Discovery, UCL's open access repository, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY).
Eligible articles whose corresponding author is at UCL will continue to be made Gold open access through UCL's transformative agreements, and funding will continue to be available, according to UCL's eligibilty criteria, for research articles published in fully open access journals. The policy enables articles that are not Gold open access to benefit from immediate open access in UCL Discovery (known as Green open access).
This means that authors can continue to publish in their journals of choice, and that all scholarly articles can:
- benefit from open access through higher impact, increased citations and more collaborations,
- meet funders' open access requirements, regardless of where they are publishing,
- be reused without any restrictions imposed by publisher agrements.
Author requirements
The UCL Publications Policy requires every UCL researcher to maintain their publications record in UCL’s Research Publications Service (RPS), and to upload the accepted manuscripts of their publications to UCL through RPS, except where they are Gold open access. To do so, researchers should follow our step-by-step guide to making your paper eligible for REF 2029, and our guides to using RPS.
In recognition of the rights retention provisions in the UCL Publications Policy, UCL staff members should follow the two simple pre-submission steps on our Actions for authors page. These actions will, firstly, ensure that their co-authors are aware of the licence and, secondly, support UCL's notifications to publishers. This does not apply to articles that will be published Gold open access, whether in a fully open access journal, through UCL's transformative agreements or via other means.