Information for Research Funders

Responding to funder aims

The UK-SCL model open access policy and licence is designed to facilitate the retention of re-use rights by academics, and to support UK and other major funders’ aims (Horizon2020 etc.) of increasing accessibility to the research that they have funded. In particular

  • HEFCE : “The four UK higher education funding bodies believe that research arising from our funding should be as widely and freely accessible as the available channels for dissemination allow. Open access to research enables the prompt and widespread dissemination of research findings. It benefits the efficiency of the research process and allows publicly funded research to drive economic growth. It delivers social benefits through increased public understanding of research”.
  • RCUK : “Free and open access to the outputs of publicly‐funded research offers significant social and economic benefits as well as aiding the development of new research. The Government, in line with its overarching commitment to transparency and open data, is committed to ensuring that published research findings should be freely accessible. As bodies charged with investing public money in research, the Research Councils take very seriously their responsibilities in making the outputs from this research publicly available – not just to other researchers, but also to potential users in business, charitable and public sectors, and to the general tax‐paying public”.

The UK-SCL supports UK and international funder policies

The UK-SCL model open access policy and licence enables institutions and researchers to comply with the following agencies by deposit in institutional repositories without further action:

  1. Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
  2. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
  3. Brain Tumour Trust
  4. Chief Scientist Office, Scottish Executive (CSO)
  5. Children with Cancer UK
  6. Dunhill Medical Trust (DMT)
  7. Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
  8. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
  9. European Research Council
  10. European Commission [Horizon 2020]
  11. European Commission [FP7]
  12. Fight for Sight
  13. HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England), Scottish Funding Council (SFC), Department for Employment and Learning, Northern Ireland (DELNI), Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW ): [compliant with both the interim policy, and with the current understanding of the final policy]
  14. Jisc
  15. Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
  16. REF2021 Open Access Policy: see 13, above.

The UK-SCL enables institutions to comply with the following agencies with further action, e.g. deposit into PubMed Central:

  1. Action on Hearing Loss
  2. Alzheimer’s Society
  3. Arthritis Research UK
  4. Bloodwise
  5. Breast Cancer Now
  6. British Heart Foundation (BHF)
  7. Cancer Research UK
  8. CERN
  9. Department for International Development (DFID)
  10. Department of Health (DH)
  11. Diabetes UK
  12. Marie Curie
  13. Medical Research Council (MRC)
  14. Motor Neuron Disease Association (MND Association)
  15. Multiple Sclerosis Society
  16. Myrovlytis Trust
  17. NASA
  18. National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs)
  19. Parkinson’s UK
  20. Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
  21. Stroke Association
  22. US National Institutes of Health
  23. Wellcome Trust
  24. Worldwide Cancer Research
  25. Yorkshire Cancer Research

There were no policies identified from those available in SHERPA JULIET from the UK or major global funders, where compliance would be restricted by the UK-SCL.

Methodology

This work was carried out with respect to the policies as they were recorded in Sherpa Juliet on 2 November 2016.

To assess whether the UK Scholarly Communications Policy and Licence ( UKSCL) would allow institutions to be compliant with funder policies with no further action the following notes are made.

In the context of an Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) being made open access at the point of publication, through an institutional repository, with a CC-BY-NC licence:

  • does any funder require more than the Author Accepted Manuscript?
  • does any funder require earlier exposure than from the point of publication?
  • does any funder require a locus of deposit other than an institutional repository?
  • does any funder require a more permissive license than CC-BY-NC ?
  • would making the AM available at the point of publication go against any funder’s policy?
  • do any funders have additional requirements which would impact on either the version or the timing of open access exposure in an institutional repository?

These questions have to be asked in the context noted above, as a policy might, for example, require CC-BY-NC from a subject repository, but CC-BY from an institutional repository.

If we can answer these questions in the negative, then we could say that the policy and licence allows compliance. In other words, while we might not be able to say that the policy and licence gives you automatic compliance with funder policy (for example, they may have a requirement that a depositor adds an acknowledgement phrase to the deposit which would not be done automatically by adoption of this policy), what we might be able to say is that adoption of the policy and licence gives an institution automatic compliance with the archiving, version and timing requirements of a number of funder policies.