New UKRI Open Access Policy for Longform outputs (Monographs, Book Chapters and Edited Collections) Policy

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A new Open Access policy for Monographs, Book chapters and edited collections will come into effect on the 1st of January 2024.

The policy will apply to monographs, book chapters, or edited collections that need to acknowledge funding from UKRI or any of its councils and will be published under 7 years after the formal end of a UKRI funded project or whilst the project is still ongoing. Trade books are also in scope of the policy where it is the only output from UKRI-funded research.

UKRI has announced that there will be a 'bedding-in' period from the 1st of January 2024 until the 30th of September 2024 where they will not be monitoring for compliance or taking related actions, although authors will still be expected to comply with the policy during this period.

There is no requirement for monographs, book chapters and edited collections to be published open access when an author has signed a contract before the 1st of January 2024 or the output has been published before the 1st of January 2024. However, authors who have signed a contract with a publisher before the 1st of January 2024 may be able to request that their contract is changed to allow the output to be published open access using the UKRI fund.

The core requirements of the policy are:

  • 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.
  • 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).
  • images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content should be included in the open access version, where possible.

UKRI has initially allocated £3.5 million per year to fund this policy, which will support a range of open access models, including ‘diamond’ open access models and book processing charges. Researchers will apply to this fund through the library.

Support for Lancaster colleagues:

Detailed information about the policy, the steps you need to take to ensure your output is compliant, and how to apply to the UKRI fund can be found on the library's UKRI new Open Access policy webpage.

You can also view the Librarys Open Access Monographs webpage for general information about Open Access Monographs, open access monograph publishers, and the various publishing models available.

A number of information sessions are being held by the Library’s Open Access Team. You can book onto these sessions by clicking the links below:

A recording of one of the sessions will be made available on our UKRI Open Access Policy webpage.

You can also contact the Library’s Open Access team at openaccess@lancaster.ac.uk.

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