You must publish any research outputs arising from your research award in such a way that they fully meet your funder's requirements. The policy will be available on your funder's website and should be highlighted in the start-up documents supplied with your research award, but a summary of the standard policies for some major funders is supplied at the pages below.
To help you comply with their open access policy, your research funder may provide funding for open access fees in one of the following ways:
a) directly to you in the awarded grant (e.g., Horizon Europe)
b) via a dedicated fund held by the grant awarding body (e.g. the UKRI monograph fund, which the College open access team can apply to on your behalf, see the relevant link below)
or
c) via a dedicated fund provided to and managed by the College, to which you can apply. The funds available at Imperial are:
- UK Research and Innovation (UKRI/RCUK) fund
- Wellcome Trust fund
- Cancer Research UK fund
- British Heart Foundation fund
The Imperial Open Access Fund (Imperial Fund) is available to authors who do not have eligible open access funding in their research award or whose work is not externally funded. The fund will only pay for original research articles in journals listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Other publication types can be considered upon request – please contact us in advance of submission.
In addition to these funds, open access fees for some journal publications may be covered by publisher agreements that Imperial has signed.
UKRI’s open access policy applies to journal articles and conference proceedings submitted for publication from 1 April 2022, and to monographs and book chapters published from 1 January 2024.
For article publications, to find out if your chosen journal is compliant with the UKRI and Wellcome open access policies, use the Journal Checker Tool. If your funder is not listed use SHERPA JULIET which provides a central source of funder open access policy information.
For further assistance, please contact the Library’s open access team.
Open access policies
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Your published work must include 2 statements:
Funder acknowledgement
UKRI:
Submitted papers may also require a rights retention statement in certain circumstances, see the relevant section of the UKRI – articles page for details.
Wellcome Trust:
- Research publication acknowledgement practice: guidance for authors
- Submitted papers may also require a rights retention statement in certain circumstances, see the relevant section of the Wellcome Trust page for details
Data Access Statement
UKRI:
‘All in-scope research articles to include a Data Access Statement…’ according to the UKRI OA policy
- Describe where the underlying data associated with the paper are available and how they can be accessed
- Give reasons for any restrictions on accessing the data – e.g. to protect personal or commercial confidentiality
Examples of: How to write a data access statement