RCUK open access fund

As you may be aware, in July 2012 RCUK announced a revised OA policy, which will apply to all RCUK grant holders from 1 April 2013, and will mean that RCUK-funded research outputs have to be made available on open access. From April RCUK will provide a block grant to all institutions in receipt of RCUK funding to cover article processing charges (APCs) and other publication charges, and you will no longer be able to charge these to your RCUK research grants.

In recognition that this will be a considerable shift for many researchers in the UK, RCUK has allocated funds to 30 HEIs to contribute towards the costs of open access (OA) publishing of RCUK-funded research outputs. The College has received £729 000.

From November 2012 Imperial researchers are now asked to apply to this intermediary fund to cover open access article processing charges (APCs) and other publication charges for any material which:

a) has been accepted for publication from [date fund launched], and

b) is the output of RCUK-funded (wholly or partly) funded research.

The publication (ie journal) should be compliant with the RCUK Access to Research Outputs Policy; the Library will check all applications and inform you if the publisher does not meet RCUK conditions.

1. Articles should be published under a CC-BY licence , and you will find many publishers already offer this, or are working towards doing so.
2. You can check information about your publisher’s OA policy using Sherpa Romeo .
3. Information on publishers who provide Paid options for open access can also be found at Sherpa Romeo.

The application form is available at the Library website and to complete it you will need:

• the details of your publication,
• costs of the APC and page charges (where applied),
• and your grant information.

Please note that:

• Not all articles will require the payment of APCs to made available on open access
• This intermediary fund is for RCUK-funded research outputs only; if you want to publish non-RCUK funded work on open access and require fee payment, please apply to the Wellcome Trust or OA Publication fund as appropriate.