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New Open-Access Policy for UKRI-Funded Work

Journal articles stemming from UK Research and Innovation-funded research must be made freely available upon publication beginning next April, Times Higher Education reports.

Nature News notes that the new UKRI policy hews closely to that of Plan S, the open-access initiative supported by a number of European funding agencies including UKRI that went into effect earlier this year. For peer-reviewed research, the new UKRI policy will require papers to be immediately open access, for either the final or accepted version of the manuscript to be deposited in an institutional or subject matter repository, and to be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

"Publicly funded research should be available for public use by the taxpayer," UKRI's Duncan Wingham tells Science.

THE adds that UKRI is to provide £46.7 million in funding each year to support the program. It notes, though, that UKRI funding won't be able to be used to support publication in hybrid journals that accept both subscriptions and OA fees, unless the hybrid journal has a transitional agreement under which they are moving toward open access. This, it notes, could prevent UKRI-funded researchers from publishing in journals like Nature. Science adds the UKRI plans to make more details about the policy available in November.