Imperial's research publications open access policy

The policy enables authors to make their research outputs openly available, ensuring wider and more equitable access to anyone wanting to read Imperial authored research. This policy is a revision of the College’s Open Access Policy, first implemented in 2012.

Authors will retain copyright over their work. Under the policy, each author grants the College a non‐exclusive, irrevocable, sub-licensable, worldwide licence (effective from acceptance of publication) to make the AAM publicly available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. The right being granted is that of allowing the College to make the accepted manuscript openly available in Spiral without an embargo from the date of publication. The College does not retain the copyright to research outputs.

1. We would advise you check our list of notified publishers which will be updated regularly to find out if you need to add a rights retention statement to your accepted manuscript. If your publisher is on our list, submit your manuscript as you normally would and when it has been accepted for publication, please upload it to Symplectic, as you would previously done.
2. If your publisher isn’t on our list of notified publishers, please contact the Open Access team who can arrange for notification. You can then submit your manuscript as soon as you need to, and we would advise you include the rights retention statement when you do submit. You only need to do this when submitting work to publishers not on the notified publishers list.  We recommend using the following wording: For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a ‘Creative Commons Attribution’ (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising.

We notified publishers of the policy implementation date in November and December 2023. New publishers will be added to the list regularly. Please contact your librarian or the Open Access team if you have any questions about your publisher/s.

Yes.

The RPOAP does apply to students including postgraduate taught, postgraduate research and undergraduate students. That means if you are publishing in a non-open access journal, you will be able to make your accepted manuscript openly available on publication. This means it will get to a much wider audience than if it were only accessible in a subscription journal. If you are an undergraduate or postgraduate taught student publishing a journal article or conference proceeding, please contact the Open Access team for advice about how to make your work available on open access.

Peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings accepted for publication from 1 January 2024.

1. You can request to opt-out of the policy on an article-by-article basis. Please follow the prompts outlined in the opt-out form. You should note that by opting out, your research output may not then meet the terms of your funders open access policy, or be eligible for submission to a future REF.
2. If you are publishing in an open access journal, you do not have to deposit a copy of the accepted manuscript or version of record to Spiral, but you can choose to do so if you want.

You should notify your co-authors that the RPOAP will apply to your published papers. When the paper is published all co-authors will be able to benefit from the paper being available open access in our repository. While co-authors can then deposit a copy of the manuscript in their institutional repositories, we’d advise providing co-authors with a link to the accepted manuscript in Spiral to reduce duplication.

1. You should make your co-author(s) aware of the Research Publications Open Access Policy. It is likely to be easiest for the corresponding author to handle any correspondence between the co-authors. When the paper is published all co-authors will be able to benefit from the paper being available open access in our repository.
2. Where the number of co-authors is too large for a discussion of the policy requirement to be practical, then you should notify the corresponding author of the requirement of the policy. The corresponding author can then handle any communication among the co-authors.

Open access publishers do not have to be notified of RPOAP, and you can submit your work to their journals as you normally would. You do not have to deposit a copy of the accepted manuscript or version of record to Spiral, but you can choose to do so if you want.

If your publisher isn’t on our list of notified publishers, please contact the Open Access team who can arrange for notification. You can then submit your manuscript as soon as you need to, and we would advise you include the rights retention statement when you do submit. You only need to do this when submitting work to publishers not on the notified publishers list.  We recommend using the following wording: For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a ‘Creative Commons Attribution’ (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising.

If the version you have deposited in arXiv is the accepted version, then you can add the link to the OA location field in Symplectic Elements. You should choose the CC BY licence to be applied to this version in arXiv.

Please send the following statement to the Open Access team to confirm the preprint is the accepted version:

Dear Open Access Team,

I, the author of TITLE, DOI/CITATION, can confirm that the version of the paper currently held in PREPRINT SERVER NAME:PREPRINT NUMBER, version 1/2/3/4 etc., is the accepted manuscript version of this paper, which was submitted to PREPRINT NAME on INSERT PREPRINT DEPOSIT DATE, prior to its first publication on PUBLICATION DATE.

Kind regards, AUTHOR’S NAME

If you are publishing with a full OA publisher or your publisher is on the list of those notified, you do not need to include a rights retention statement. If your publisher has not been notified, we would advise that you include a rights retention statement, and contact the Open Access team openaccess@imperial.ac.uk who can arrange for notification. See our UKRI and Wellcome Trust policy pages for information about their open access policy requirements, and the wording for the relevant statement. If you are funded by both UKRI and Wellcome Trust, you may use either funder’s wording for the statement, as they both have the same purpose.