Compliance with open access policies

There are three main providers of Open Access (OA) policies with which you need to comply - your employer, your funder, and your publisher.  If your research publications acknowledge multiple funding sources, then please ensure that you have complied with the different requirements for each funder.

The University of Portsmouth Open Access Policy

The policy states that UoP is committed to ensuring that the Outputs of its research can be accessed readily (and that) that maximum visibility and accessibility can be achieved through unrestricted online access and requires you to upload a version of your article into our institutional repository where possible.

The REF OA Policy

The REF OA Policy, first published in 2014, made OA a new eligibility requirement for all in scope publications submitted to REF 2021.  Although UK Universities have made their submissions to REF 2021, the compliance requirements of the REF OA Policy remain in place until Research England have reviewed the policy for the next REF 2028.  The publication types in scope of the policy are research articles and papers published in journals and conference proceedings with an ISSN.

There are two key requirements to comply with the REF OA Policy.  First, the author's accepted manuscript (AAM or 'post-print version') should be deposited into Pure within the deadline of 3 months from the date of acceptance.  Second, the post-print should be made OA on the University's Research Portal, which is linked up to Pure, within the maximum embargo limit allowed for the respective REF Main Panels (12 months for Panels A & B and 24 months for Panels C & D).

In the current policy, there are no licensing requirements either for Green OA or Gold OA.  This also means that the most restrictive Creative Commons licence, CC-BY-NC-ND, is allowed on both the author's post-print version of the article and publisher's version of record.  Immediate Gold OA automatically meets the OA requirement.  A number of policy exceptions may apply, e.g., depositing the post-print beyond 3 months of acceptance but within 3 months of first publication.

The UKRI OA Policy

The UKRI OA Policy applies to in scope publications acknowledging research funding from one of its research councils.  This applies to peer-reviewed articles submitted for publication from 1st April 2022 (research and review articles published in journals, conference proceedings with an ISSN, and OA publishing platforms).  It also applies to long-form publications published from 1st January 2024 (book chapters, monographs and edited collections).

For peer-reviewed articles, the policy requires that:

1. Peer-reviewed research articles acknowledging UKRI funding which are submitted for publication from 1 April 2022 must be immediately open access upon publication (no publisher embargo) via a journal, publishing platform or repository, with a CC BY licence.  A CC BY-ND licence will only be permitted by exception.  Please follow this process to request an exception from UKRI. 

Immediate open access can be achieved by one of the following routes: 

a. Publish Gold OA in a fully open access journal or platform with a CC BY licence. Our UKRI open access block grant will cover the open access cost.  Apply for APC funding or contact openaccess@port.ac.uk for assistance.  

b. Publish Gold OA in a journal covered by one of our Read and Publish agreements.  UKRI will not fund open access or publishing costs in subscription journals that are not covered by such an agreement.

c. Publish in a subscription (‘hybrid’) journal without paying a publication fee and add your Author’s Accepted Manuscript to Pure with a CC BY licence so that it is immediately open access. You must include the following statement in the acknowledgement section of your submitted manuscript in order to inform the publisher of your intention to retain copyright of the article:

For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence (where permitted by UKRI, ‘Open Government Licence’ or ‘CC BY-ND public copyright licence’ may be stated instead) to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising.

If you are looking for a compliant journal for your funded research, use the Journal Checker Tool.  

2. Your UKRI funded research or review article requires a Data availability statement.  This applies even if your article does not contain any data, or if it does but the data is not accessible.  For further support with Data Access Statements, please contact researchdata@port.ac.uk

3. Biomedical research articles that acknowledge MRC or BBSRC funding are required to be archived in Europe PubMed Central 

For long-form publications, the policy requires that:

1. The final Version of Record or Author's Accepted Manuscript must be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publisher's website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication.

2. Images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content must be included in the open access version, where possible.

3. The open access version of the publication must have a Creative Commons licence, with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence preferred.  An Open Government licence is also permitted.  (This requirement does not apply to third party materials included in the publication.) 

For help with publishing an open access book or chapter, use the OA Books Toolkit.

For further support with OA compliance, please contact openaccess@port.ac.uk