Institutional Repository Infrastructure for Scotland

Repository toolkit

• Home

• Contents
• Introduction and overview
• Tookit for researchers
  • Introduction
  • Legal issues
  • How to deposit
  • Engaging open access
  • Funding bodies
  • Local contacts
• Toolkit for for institutions and repository managers
• Useful resources

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• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License for Scotland and a Creative Commons License for England and Wales
• Last updated 7 Dec 2007
• Version 1.0

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Toolkit for researchers

Funding bodies and open access

A growing number of funders in the UK and elsewhere have recognised the important of making research as widely available as possible. They have therefore introduced new conditions of grant that require grant holders either to deposit their publications in open access repositories or to publish in an open access manner. A number of funders, particularly in the biomedical areas, have approached this by requiring grant holders to deposit their publications in a subject based repository, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC). Other funders will permit deposit in any appropriate repository.

Funding bodies have provided advice on these policies on their web site, but your local repository staff may also be able to advise you.

An important point to note is that in response to the development of these open access policies, a number of publishers have introduced open access options. In most cases these involve the payment of a fee, whereupon the individual article will be made freely available to all via the publisher's web site. In some cases the publisher will also carry out deposit in UKPMC on behalf of the author in order to meet the grant conditions. Some funders have provided funds to pay for these open access options, but not all have.

You should also note that in some cases choosing a publisher's open access option may be the only way of meeting the requirements of your funding body. An example would be a Wellcome Trust grant holder publishing in an Elsevier journal. The Wellcome Trust require grant holders to make articles available in UKPMC. Elsevier will not allow authors to deposit their own version of articles in UKPMC, so the only way of meeting the Wellcome Trust's requirement is by choosing the paid Elsevier open access option. Elsevier do permit authors to deposit the final version of their articles in an institutional repository, but not in subject based repositories. However, deposit in an institutional repository would not meet the Wellcome Trust's conditions.

Publishers are responding to funding body open access policies in a variety of ways, and the consequence of this is that how you can comply will vary according to where you publish.

You can find out more about the various policies in place from the JULIET summary of research funders' open access policies.