The UK government and UKRI recognise open access as an important part of achieving maximum impact from public investment in research.
As set out in the UKRI Strategic Prospectus, open access is a key foundation for a research culture and environment that fosters excellent research and innovation and ensures that research is accessible, transparent and cooperative and produces better quality outputs more efficiently.
The consultation has been launched as part of UKRI’s ongoing Open Access Review, which will determine a single open access policy across the organisation for research articles and long-form academic publications which acknowledge UKRI funding.
UKRI Executive Champion for Open Access, Professor Sir Duncan Wingham, said: “Maximising the re-use of publicly-funded research findings is central to UKRI’s ambitions for research and innovation in the UK.
“We encourage contributions from across the research and innovation landscape to the consultation, which will help to shape our forthcoming new open access policy.”
The proposed policy applies to peer-reviewed research articles accepted for publication on or after 1 January 2022. Under the proposed policy, these should be made freely and immediately available online through a journal, open access publishing platform or an institutional or subject repository. UKRI would also require articles to be made available with a license allowing maximum reuse.
The proposed policy extends open access requirements to include academic monographs, book chapters and edited collections, whilst taking into account that the open access environment for long-form publications is different.
The consultation, also seeks views to inform supporting actions for policy implementation and potential wider implications of the proposed policy, including in relation to equality, diversity and inclusion.
The consultation opened on 13 February and will close on 17 April. UKRI will use responses to inform its final policy, which it intends to announce in 2020.