Funder requirements

Funder Requirements

Many funders have Open Access requirements for the outputs of research they fund. It is important to check the terms of your grant. You can also search for funder requirements and permitted embargo periods using the SHERPA/JULIET database.

Plan S

Plan S: In Brief

  • Plan S is an initiative for full immediate Open Access publishing
  • From 1st January 2021 funders requiring Plan S compliance are: Wellcome, European Commission (Horizon Europe), European Research Council and other funders
  • From 1st April 2022 UKRI funders is closely Plan S aligned

To comply:

  • When authors submit manuscripts for publication include this "rights retention" statement*** in the funding acknowledgement section of the manuscript: 

This research was funded in whole, or in part, by [Funder name, Grant number xxxxx]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

  • As usual, upon acceptance from the publisher, deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript (peer reviewed version) in STORRE via Worktribe (in the University Portal: select ‘Access Worktribe (Research System)’ under ‘I want to’).
  • (Where the final publication is Open Access at the journal web site - Library staff will replace the Author Accepted Manuscript with the Version of Record once it is available)
  • See video on use of Rights Retention

 

When publishing there are three possible routes to compliance:

  1. *Route 1: Publish in a fully Open Access journal or platform. Funders will help cover charges. The University APC Fund supports publishing in fully Open Access journals.
  2. Route 2: Publish in a subscription journal and upon publication make the Author Accepted Manuscript openly available in STORRE via Worktribe
  3. *Route 3: Publish in a subscription journal through a transformative arrangement (see University of Stirling's transformative agreements)
  •   Use the Journal Checker Tool to see which routes to compliance you can use for your preferred journals

* = Plan S preferred routes

 

***Use of Rights Statement

Inclusion of a rights statement is part of funders’ strategies to allow you to continue to publish in the journal of your choice whilst still meeting their Open Access requirements. If the publisher accepts your submission with the rights text, then under copyright law you have the right to make your Author Accepted Manuscript Open Access without an embargo and with a CC BY licence. The rights statement takes legal precedence over later, possibly contradictory, statements the publisher may routinely ask for from authors. Note however that some publishers may later ask you to sign a contract that includes statements saying you will embargo your Manuscript.  In this case, if you then later share your Manuscript without an embargo then technically this risks you being exposed to legal action a publisher could take based on contract law. Since signing then adhering to the contract will bring you into conflict with your funder’s requirements – do not sign such a contract. 

If a publisher asks you to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA) or Licence to Publish, you should read it critically to check for terms that may conflict with the Open Access conditions of your grant agreement. For example, requires an embargo or doesn't allow a CC BY licence for your Accepted Manuscript. If needed – you can request amendments be made to the publisher's wording. Alternatively, the publisher may re-route your manuscript to a fully Open Access journal or in rare cases may strip out the statement or reject the submission.

Therefore, before you submit a manuscript for publication you should consider the journal's/publisher's practices in this area.

Even with prior consideration you many find yourself in these situations – if you wish you can contact openaccess@stir.ac.uk to consult on how best to respond.

Brief Plan S leaflet

Download the brief Plan S leaflet

Plan S: In Detail

  • Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing
  • Supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders
    • From 1st January 2021 a number of funders have Plan S compliant Open Access policies. For example:
    • From 1st April 2022 the UKRI Open Access policy will become Plan S aligned

Plan S: Key Principles and Requirements

  • No publication should be locked behind a paywall
  • Open Access must be immediate, i.e. no embargo periods
  • No copyright transfer
  • Publications must be under a CC BY licence by default (exceptionally CC BY-ND licence for individual articles)
  • Preference for the Version of Record (rather than the Author Accepted Manuscript)
  • Will not support publication in hybrid journals unless they are part of a transformative arrangement (will not support after end of 2024)
  • Transparency about pricing and contracts
  • Funders commit to support publication fees at a reasonable level (could cap APCs in future)
  • Multiple routes to Open Access compliance
  • Commitment to assess research outputs based on their intrinsic merit and NOT venue of publication

Plan S: Authors Rights Retention Strategy

Plan S is underpinned by an important Rights Retention Strategy for funded authors:

  • Authors (or their organisations) must retain sufficient intellectual property rights to comply with Plan S Open Access requirements – University of Stirling does not assert ownership or ask for copyright assignment for publications - our authors retain these rights
  • Authors/institutions must ensure Open Access to Author Accepted Manuscripts, or the Version of Record, of research articles at the time of publication
  • When authors submit original research articles to peer-reviewed journals for publication they must include a statement like the following:

This research was funded in whole, or in part, by [Funder name, Grant number xxxxx]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Plan S: Routes to Compliance

*Route 1: Publish in a fully Open Access journal or platform

  • Funders will cover fair and reasonable article processing charges (APCs) (if certain conditions are met)
  • The University has the APC Fund to support Open Access publishing in fully OA journals. Apply to the APC Fund

Route 2: Publish in a subscription journal and upon publication make the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) openly available in a repository

  • When complying by this route, no APC should be paid to the publisher
  • Deposit your Author Accepted Manuscript (peer reviewed version) in the University’s Open Access Repository STORRE via Worktribe. (To deposit via Worktribe: in the Portal - under the ‘My Stirling Life’ tab select ‘Access Worktribe (Research System‘ listed in the ‘I want to section’
  • Route 2 relies on the presence of the Rights Retention Statement in your submitted manuscript - read the above important notes on the Strategy before submitting your manuscript to a publisher.

*Route 3: Publish in a subscription journal through a transformative arrangement that is available via University of Stirling

  • The University Library has joined a number of transformative agreements to support this route – see the Where to publish page

*Preferred routes: the Plan S preference is for the Version of Record (publisher’s final version) to be made Open Access for this reason the preferred routes are routes 1 or 3.

Plan S: Journal Checker Tool

A Journal Checker Tool is available for checking which routes to compliance can be used for your preferred journals – see: https://journalcheckertool.org/

Note on Transformative Arrangements

Plan S supports three transformative strategies:

1. Transformative Agreements - these consist of contractual agreements between publishers and library consortia (e.g. JISC in the UK context) whereby subscription costs are reallocated to support costs of open access publishing. Such agreements are also known as 'Read & Publish' deals. Under this model subscription costs are to be phased out by the end of 2024 but Universities who are parties to such agreements continue to make payments to support publication costs. Plan S calls for such agreements to comply with ESAC Guidelines. University of Stirling is a member of a number of Transformative Agreements – see the asterisked Agreements on our ‘Where to publish’ page.

2. Transformative Model Agreements - these involve smaller publishers, such as Society Publishers, but otherwise follow similar principles to Transformative Agreements with libraries continuing to pay a subscription charge to the journal / publisher and in exchange authors from their University are able to publish with the journal in a compliant open access fashion without additional payment needing to be made.

3. Transformative Journals - where a journal commits to incrementally increasing the proportion of open access articles published year on year, with a corresponding decrease in subscription costs. The journal commits to fully 'flipping' to become an open access journal once 75% of its content is being published open access. Although Plan S does not require the journal to become fully Open Access by a specific date, Plan S funding for Transformative Journals will cease at the end of 2024. For example: the Elsevier publisher has made a number of their titles Transformative Journals.

 

 

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI, formerly Research Councils UK (RCUK))

The UKRI Open Access Policy is Plan S aligned, the policy requires: 

  • Immediate Open Access for peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication from 1 April 2022 (includes reviews* and conference papers with an ISSN)
  • Open Access within 12 months of publication for monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024

*The policy applies to in-scope reviews that are commissioned or invited. Examples include: evidence syntheses, systematic reviews, systematic-literature reviews, analyses, meta-analyses and meta-syntheses. The policy does not apply to narrative reviews.

An online webinar on how to comply with the policy was held on Wednesday 30th March 2022. Webinar slides are available here. The webinar recording can be accessed here for staff and here for PGRs.

Policy for peer-reviewed research articles

In summary, two routes are permitted:

  • Route 1
    • Publish in an open access journal or publishing platform with immediate Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence (or by exception CC BY-ND).
    • This includes publishing in Open Access only journals (for example as listed in DOAJ) and journals covered by the University's transformative arrangements (for most Agreements you will need to be the corresponding author). 
  • Route 2
    • Publish the research article in a subscription journal and deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (or Version of Record, where permitted) in a compliant institutional or subject repository at the time of final publication - under a CC BY licence. No embargo period is permitted.
    • Note: publishing in a hybrid journal will not be covered by UKRI funds nor by the University's APC Fund (that is, a subscription journal where only some articles are available open access).
    • For articles to be published under Route 2, submissions must include the following text in the funding acknowledgement section of the manuscript and any cover letter/note accompanying the submission:
      • ‘For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising’
      • Note the use of this statement closely aligns with the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy – read the above important notes on the Strategy before submitting your manuscript to a publisher.

Note:

  • Unless you are very confident you will be able to publish via Route 1 it may be sensible to include the rights statement in all your UKRI funded submitted manuscripts, so you have at least one compliant route available to you.
  • All Stirling research articles should be deposited in STORRE via Worktribe in addition to any other repositories used. (To meet REF requirements deposit when your article is accepted for publication).
  • A Journal Checker Tool is available which can show compliant routes for your preferred journals.
  • Biomedical research articles that acknowledge MRC or BBSRC funding are required to be archived in Europe PubMed Central.
  • Remember to include Acknowledgement of your funding - see Funder Acknowledgement.
  • UKRI requires in-scope research articles to include a Data Access Statement, even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible. (Get advice on writing Data Access Statements - under Data Management Guidance).
  • See full details of the policy in the UKRI Open Access Policy document.

 

Policy for monographs, book chapters and edited collections

In summary, for in-scope monographs, book chapters and edited collections:

  • The final Version of Record or the Author’s Accepted Manuscript must be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publishers’ website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication.
  • UKRI permits some exemptions, for example, where the work is the outcome of a UKRI Training Grant.
  • The open access version to be published under a Creative Commons licence, preferably Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) Licence.
  • See full details of the policy in the UKRI Open Access Policy document.

 

 

Wellcome Trust

  • Wellcome's Open Access Policy applies to original, peer-reviewed research articles (not reviews) arising from work funded, or partly funded, by Wellcome
  • Applies to articles submitted for publication from 1 January 2021
  • The policy is in line with the key principles of Plan S
  • Research articles must be: 
    • Published under a Creative Commons attribution licence (CC BY), unless Wellcome agreed an exception, to allow publication under a CC BY-ND licence
    • Made freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC by the official final publication date

All grantholders will:

  • Automatically grant a CC BY public copyright licence to all their future funded Author Accepted Manuscripts
  • So authors must include the following statement in all submissions of original research to peer-reviewed journals:

This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number xxxxx]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

  • This statement should be included in the funding acknowledgement section of the manuscript and any cover letter that accompanies the submission

 

There are three compliant routes for publication:

1. Route 1: Publish in a fully Open Access journal or platform that takes responsibility for making the Version of Record for the article freely available from Europe PMC at the time of publication, under a CC BY licence

 

2. Route 2: Publish in a subscription journal and take responsibility for making the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) freely available from Europe PMC at the time of publication

  • This route relies on the Rights Retention Strategy that aims to enable deposit of your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in Europe PMC where the AAM can be made immediately publicly available with zero embargo. However, before you submit your manuscript for publication see the important notes above on use of the Rights Retention Statement.
  • Wellcome advise that when you select a journal you should check the terms of the publishing contract to make sure that it doesn't affect your ability to comply with their policy. You should not sign a publishing contract that:
  1. applies an embargo period to the self-archiving of the AAM post publication, and
  2. does not allow the AAM to be made freely available under a CC BY licence.

 

3. Route 3: Publish in a subscription journal through a transformative arrangement that is available to you via your organisation

  • The University Library has joined a number of transformative arrangements to support this route – see our page “Publisher memberships and transformative arrangements” at https://stir.ac.uk/4fx
  • Under this route, the publisher takes responsibility for making the Version of Record for the articles freely available in Europe PMC at the time of publication, under a CC BY licence.
  • If you are not the corresponding author and no other author has access to a Transformative Agreement, then you should use the Rights Retention strategy and self-archive a copy of the Author Accepted Manuscript in Europe PMC on publication and under a CC BY licence.

Wellcome’s preference is for the Version of Record to be made Open Access so their preferred routes are routes 1 or 3. However, Wellcome have also said that the preference for the Version of Record is not unconditional and at any price.  So if the APC price levied via Route 3 seems to be neither fair or reasonable, authors can instead use the Rights Retention Strategy (Route 2) to meet their open access requirements.

A Journal Checker Tool is available so you can check which routes you can use for your preferred journals – see: https://journalcheckertool.org/

 

Further Wellcome requirements include:

  • Data Statements:
    • Articles must include a statement explaining how other researchers can access any data, original software or materials underpinning the research - see: Wellcome's Data Guidelines
  • Preprints:
    • Where there is a significant public health benefit to preprints being shared widely and rapidly, such as a disease outbreak, Wellcome require the posting of preprints
  • Monographs and book chapters:
    • All original scholarly monographs and book chapters: 
      • Must be made freely available through NCBI Bookshelf and Europe PMC as soon as possible and no later than within 6 months of the official final publication date - see Depositing your Wellcome-funded research
      • Where a fee has been paid to the publisher to make the work open access, it must be published under a Creative Commons licence (preferably CC BY). 
  • Wellcome-funded organisations must sign or publicly commit to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) (Stirling is a DORA signatory)

 

See full details of the Wellcome open access policy

  • Note: researchers  who do not comply with this policy will be subject to appropriate sanctions. These may include Wellcome:
    • not accepting new grant applications
    • suspending funding to organisations in extreme cases

 

Note: to fulfill Stirling's policies you should also deposit your published article or Author Accepted Manuscript in the University’s Repository STORRE where it will be made publicly available with zero embargo.  Deposit via Worktribe: in the University Portal: select ‘Access Worktribe (Research System)’ under ‘I want to’.

 

Chief Scientist's Office (Scottish Government) 

CSO requires that papers published as a result of their funding are:

  • Made publically available within six months of the date of publication (through an open access journal or deposit in a repository such as STORRE)

And

Researchers can apply to CSO for up to £2000 towards the costs of Open Access publishing of a paper arising from a CSO funded research project.

National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)/Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC)

Policy for articles submitted from 1 June 2022 onwards

The NIHR/DHSC (Department of Health and Social Care) open access policy:

  • applies to peer-reviewed research articles, including review articles (not commissioned by publishers) and conference papers submitted for publication from 1st June 2022.
  • Peer-reviewed research articles which are otherwise out of scope (e.g. NIHR Infrastructure research studies with minority NIHR funding), but which acknowledge NIHR support/funding must be deposited and made freely accessible through Europe PubMed Central (PMC), as soon as possible, but no later than 12 months post the official final publication date.
  • Requires immediate open access through Europe PMC upon final publication under a CC BY licence (or Open Government Licence (OGL) or on a case by case basis a CC BY-ND licence).
  • If an open access fee, such as an article processing charge (APC), has been funded by the NIHR, then the publisher must ensure the Version of Record is deposited in Europe PMC and made public at the time of publication.
  • Submissions to subscription journals must include the following statement in the funding acknowledgement, applying the CC BY licence to the accepted manuscript:

For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising

 

How to comply with the NIHR policy:

  • Complying by publishing in a fully Open Access journal:
    • If an article processing charge (APC), has been funded by NIHR, then the publisher must ensure the Version of Record is deposited in Europe PMC and made public at the time of publication. 
  • Complying by publishing in a subscription journal and making your Author Accepted Manuscript Open Access (Green Open Access):
    • Submissions to subscription journals must include the following statement in the funding acknowledgement: 
      • For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising
    • Self-deposit your final Author Accepted Manuscript in Europe PMC upon final publication under a CC BY licence.  
  • Complying by paying an APC to publish in a subscription journal (hybrid journal):
    • Submissions to subscription journals must include the following statement in the funding acknowledgement:
      • For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising
    • If an article processing charge (APC), has been funded by NIHR, then the publisher must ensure the Version of Record is deposited in Europe PMC and made public at the time of publication.

 

Further requirements

  • You must include appropriate acknowledgment of NIHR, including the unique award identifier and disclaimer in the funding or acknowledgments section of the manuscript and in the funding information requested by the publication on submission. Read more on how to acknowledge the NIHR in research outputs.
  • You must include a data sharing statement describing how the underpinning research data can be accessed. Where there are reasons to protect access to the data, for example commercial confidentiality or sensitivities around data derived from potentially identifiable human participants, these should be included in the statement. Read more about the NIHR position on the sharing of research data.
  • NIHR provide an Author Compliance Checklist.
  • All Stirling research articles should be deposited in STORRE via Worktribe in addition to any other repositories used. (To meet REF requirements deposit when your article is accepted for publication).

 

 Funding for the NIHR Open Access Policy

  • Grant holders with awards issued before 1st June 2022 should use the open access budget included in their overall research costs to pay for open access for articles.
  • Grant holders with awards issued after 1st June 2022 will be provided with an 'open access funding envelope' from which they can cover the costs of open access for a period extending to two years beyond the end point of their research funding. This open access funding envelope will be automatically allocated on top of the costs of successful awards (see list of eligible NIHR schemes). So, researchers should not include open access costs as part of their grant application form.

 More funding info at: https://www.nihr.ac.uk/documents/nihr-open-access-publications-funding-guidance/30210

 

 

Policy below for articles submitted before 1 June 2022:

  • NIHR/DHSC (Department of Health and Social Care) open access policy applies to peer-reviewed research articles, including review articles not commissioned by publishers, final reports and executive summaries, supported in whole or in part by NIHR funding.
  • The policy does not apply to editorials, letters, commissioned reviews, scholarly monographs, conference proceedings or book chapters.
  • NIHR-funded researchers must publish their main study findings in a peer-reviewed, fully open access journal under the CC BY licence.
  • All outputs must be made open access in PubMedCentral within six months of the official date of publication.
  • Complying via Green Open Access: With the exception of your main study findings, if you are publishing in a subscription journal, provided that the journal's embargo on Green open access is no longer than 6 months you can comply by uploading your final accepted manuscript to Europe PubMedCentral.
  • Complying via Gold open access: If you are publishing in a subscription journal with a Gold open access option (known as a hybrid journal), or you are publishing in a fully open access journal, you can comply through Gold open access. 
  • NIHR/DHSC expects grantholders to make provision from their funding award to cover the costs of open access publishing in an open access journal. 

Horizon 2020

Publications funded in whole or in part by Horizon 2020 grants must meet their open access requirements:

  • Open access policies apply to research articles, monographs and other research publications supported in whole or in part by Horizon 2020 funding.
  • Publications should be deposited in a suitable open access repository (such as STORRE)  This must be done as soon as possible and at the latest upon publication. (Note to meet REF requirements you should deposit when your article when it is accepted for publication).
  • These publications should be made open access in the repository within six months of the official date of publication (12 months for outputs in social sciences and humanities).
  • Horizon 2020 open access guidelines
  • Horizon 2020 factsheet for researchers
  • Horizon 2020 factsheet for research administrators

 

Complying Horizon 2020 via Green open access:

  • If you are publishing in a subscription journal, you can comply by depositing your final accepted manuscript to STORRE via Worktribe, provided that the journal's embargo on Green open access is no longer than:
    • 12 months, for Social Sciences and Humanities papers
    • 6 months, for all other papers
  • Note that to meet REF requirements you should deposit when your article when it is accepted for publication.
  • The Horizon 2020 open access guidelines (page 7) require you to include specific information when you upload to a repository.

Complying Horizon 2020 via Gold open access:

  • You can publish in a subscription journal with a Gold open access option (a hybrid journal) or a fully Open Access journal and comply by depositing your final publisher version in STORRE via Worktribe.
  • Note that to meet REF requirements you should deposit when your article when it is accepted for publication.
  • Open access charges can be paid from your Horizon 2020 grants, provided they are incurred during the duration of the project.
  • You can apply to the University APC Fund to cover Open Access publishing costs if you are publishing in a fully Open Access journal or if it is required due to the Funder’s Open Access policy.

Cancer Research UK (CRUK)

From 1st January 2022:

  • CRUK policy requires all original research articles (not reviews) to be made immediately open access from Europe PubMed Central (with a CC BY by licence if an APC has been paid).
  • Applies to articles accepted for publication from 1st January 2022.
  • You can comply by any of these routes:
    • Route 1: Publish in a fully open access or hybrid journal which makes the Version of Record (VoR) freely available immediately upon online publication. Typically, the journal deposits the final publication in Europe PMC on the authors' behalf.  When an APC has been paid the CC BY licence must be used.
    • Route 2: Publish in a subscription journal and make the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) available immediately upon online publication by self-dposit in Europe PubMed Central preferably under a CC BY licence.
    • Route 3: Publish in a journal covered by Stirling's transformative agreements (typically you are required to be the corresponding author).
  • Stirling is not in receipt of a CRUK open access block grant, you can:
    • Pay for APCs using any available underspend on your active CRUK response mode grant. (Going forward APC costs should not be included in any new application budgets - see CRUK costs guidance.
    • If you have no grant money left you can apply to the University's APC Fund.
  • You must acknowledge Cancer Research UK funding in the funding acknowledgement section of the paper, using your grant reference number.
  • You are strongly encouraged to post pre-prints and publish them under a CC BY licence on a platform indexed in Europe PMC.
  • See the full details of the CRUK Open Access Policy

Other Funders:

You should always check the requirements of your funder. Other funders who have a policy on open access publishing include:

Funder Acknowledgement

All papers should include acknowledgement of the funder name(s) and official award number. 

Acknowledgement of funding should be a sentence with the funding agency written out in full, followed by the grant number in square brackets (if you have one). For example:

This work was supported by the Medical Research Council [grant number xxxx]’

Multiple grant numbers should be separated by comma and space. Where the research was supported by more than one agency, the different agencies should be separated by a semicolon, with “and” before the final funder. For example:

This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number zzzz]; and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number XXXX].

A list of standard names for major UK research funders is available on the Research Information Network pages.

Note you must include the official award number.

See also points 7, 8 and 9 in the 'Acknowledgement of Funders Articles' at: https://www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/RIN-251020-FundersAcknowledgementInScholarlyjournalArticles.pdf

Where research is not funded by any specific project grant, the suggested text is: 'This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.'

 

If you have an editorial role and are considering quoting Funding in Edited collections:

  • When quoting funding sources, editors should distinguish between funding that applies to the creation of the collection as a whole, and the funding underpinning each individual article (the latter should be quoted in each article, where relevant). Please do not add a standard acknowledgement to all articles in an edited collection unless it can be evidenced that the funding specifically supported the research in each article
  • If an award underpins an entire edition then acknowledge the award on each article.  

Statement on Research Materials/Data

Publications should include a statement on how the underlying materials - such as data, samples or models - can be accessed. It is not necessary that the data be openly accessible if there are compelling reasons against this. For more information, please see our Data Access Statement page.

UKRI require in-scope research articles to include a Data Access Statement, even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible. (Get advice on writing Data Access Statements - under Data Management Guidance).

Wellcome funded articles must include a statement explaining how other researchers can access any data, original software or materials underpinning the research - see: Wellcome's Data Guidelines

DataSTORRE is the University’s repository for data – you can deposit data or records about data in DataSTORRE. You will be given a DataSTORRE persistent identifier and citation that can be used in your publications’ data statements.  See more about DataSTORRE.

Licences

Before publication publishers usually ask authors to sign and return a licence agreement, sometimes called an author publishing agreement.

When paying an open access fee, authors should normally choose a licence of type 'CC-BY'.  Other licence types such as CC-BY-NC or other extensions are generally unacceptable to funders.

If authors are asked to provide a copyright line for the article the format is:

Copyright symbol, year, author name, standard copyright statement. For example:

© 2019 Initial. Surname. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

If there is more than one author add et. al. after the surname.

Europe PubMed Central

Full-text of articles that acknowledge the following funders must be deposited and made freely available in Europe PubMed Central (PMC) within 6 months of publication*:

  • Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
  • Bloodwise
  • British Heart Foundation
  • Cancer Research UK
  • Chief Scientist's Office (Scottish Government)
  • Medical Research Council (MRC)
  • Parkinson’s UK
  • Versus Arthritis
  • Wellcome Trust (*no delay permitted: deposit upon publication)

Biomedical articles funded by UKRI must also be deposited in Europe PMC within 6 months.  This is typically, but not only, articles funded by The Medical Research Council and sometimes the Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council. The full list of Europe PMC funders can be found at: https://europepmc.org/Funders/.

Where an open access fee has been paid to the journal you must deposit the final version of the article - often the journal will do this on behalf of the author but you should check this is the case. Where the article is not open access at the journal, the author must self-deposit their final accepted version, that is the Author’s Accepted Manuscript, to Europe PMC within 6 months of final publication.

When you deposit to Europe PMC you should ultimately receive a PMCID for the final referenced article.

Note: the PMCID should not be confused with a PMID which does not necessarily indicate compliance with funder's policies as it is only a metadata reference and the record may not contain the full-text of the article.  The full-text can arrive in PubMed Central later than the metadata if the publisher is depositing (due to embargo or some other publisher delay).  The PMCID indicates that the full-text is available.

It can take a few weeks for text of publications that authors submit via Europe PMC to be processed, approved and pubished on PubMed Central with the PMCID.

Further details on how to deposit to Europe PMC:

Getting help

If you have further queries about funder's Open Access requirements contact: openaccess@stir.ac.uk