The RCUK open access report was the annual institutional compliance return that UK universities filed to Research Councils UK from 2013, tracking block-grant spend and Gold/Green compliance rates. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) absorbed this reporting duty on its formation in 2018 and then retired the manual return altogether under its harmonised 2022 open access policy.
The Research Councils UK (RCUK) open access policy is the funder mandate, introduced on 1 April 2013, that required peer-reviewed outputs acknowledging Research Council funding to be made freely accessible via a Gold or Green route.
- What was the RCUK open access report?
- Why UKRI absorbed RCUK’s reporting regime
- What changed under the 2022 UKRI open access policy
- RCUK vs UKRI open access reporting compared
- Frequently asked questions
- What this means for institutions filing compliance today
- Conclusion: where UK open access reporting goes next
What was the RCUK open access report?
The RCUK open access report was an institution-level compliance return, typically prepared as a spreadsheet, that recorded how each university’s RCUK block grant had been spent and what proportion of eligible outputs met the policy’s Gold or Green requirements. Research organisations receiving RCUK open access block grants were expected to submit these figures annually to the relevant research council.
Under the RCUK policy, Gold open access — the publisher making the final Version of Record free on publication, usually funded by an Article Processing Charge (APC) — was the preferred route, supported by direct block-grant payments to institutions. Green open access, depositing the Author’s Accepted Manuscript in a repository, was permitted subject to an embargo of up to six months for STEM subjects and twelve months for arts, humanities and social sciences. Universities such as Imperial College London, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Southampton published detailed versions of their own compliance reports, illustrating how administratively heavy the annual return had become by the mid-2010s.
Why UKRI absorbed RCUK’s reporting regime
UKRI was formed on 1 April 2018 under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, bringing together the seven former Research Councils, Innovate UK and Research England into a single funding body. This merger created both the opportunity and the obligation to harmonise the fragmented council-by-council open access reporting that RCUK had left behind.
UKRI subsequently ran a formal open access policy review, consulting institutions, publishers and researchers, with the explicit goal of replacing seven overlapping council policies — and their separate compliance paperwork — with a single UKRI-wide mandate. UKRI is also a member of cOAlition S, the international funder consortium behind Plan S, which launched in 2018 and became fully operative for its members on 1 January 2021. Plan S’s ten principles, including immediate open access with no embargo and a preference for CC BY licensing, became the template UKRI built its new policy around, rather than a patchwork of council-specific embargo periods.
What changed under the 2022 UKRI open access policy
The new UKRI open access policy took effect on 1 April 2022 for peer-reviewed research articles and conference papers with an ISSN, and on 1 January 2024 for monographs, book chapters and edited collections. It requires immediate open access with no embargo permitted, via either Gold (Version of Record free on the publisher’s site) or Green (Author’s Accepted Manuscript in a repository, released immediately under a CC BY licence through UKRI’s Rights Retention Strategy).
The most consequential change for research administrators is what UKRI removed, not just what it added: the annual institutional compliance spreadsheet that defined the RCUK era is gone. UKRI monitors compliance through existing publication metadata — repository records, CrossRef and publisher data — rather than requiring institutions to submit a standalone report. UKRI has also committed a dedicated fund of £3.5 million per year to support open access costs for long-form outputs, separate from the block-grant model that funded RCUK-era Gold APCs.
- No embargo permitted on journal articles or conference papers from 1 April 2022
- CC BY is the default licence, with CC BY-ND permitted only by exception
- Monographs, book chapters and edited collections join the policy from 1 January 2024
- Compliance monitoring shifts from submitted spreadsheets to existing metadata sources
RCUK vs UKRI open access reporting compared
The table below sets out the practical differences institutions need to reconcile when auditing historical RCUK-funded outputs against current UKRI-funded ones.
| Aspect | RCUK policy (2013–2022) | UKRI policy (from 2022/2024) |
|---|---|---|
| Reporting mechanism | Annual institutional compliance spreadsheet submitted per council | Monitoring via existing publication metadata; no standalone institutional report |
| Governing body | Seven separate Research Councils | Single UKRI-wide policy |
| Green embargo | Up to 6 months (STEM) / 12 months (AHSS) | No embargo permitted |
| Default licence | Not standardised across councils | CC BY, via the Rights Retention Strategy |
| Scope | Peer-reviewed articles and conference papers | Adds monographs, book chapters, edited collections from 2024 |
| Funding model | Block grants to institutions | Block grants plus a dedicated £3.5m/year long-form fund |
Frequently asked questions
What is an open access report?
An open access report is a compliance return that documents whether research outputs funded by a body such as RCUK or UKRI meet that funder’s open access requirements. Under RCUK it was an institution-submitted spreadsheet tracking block-grant spend; under UKRI, compliance is now inferred from publication metadata rather than a submitted document.
What is the RCUK policy on open access and supporting guidance?
The RCUK policy on open access, introduced 1 April 2013, required peer-reviewed papers acknowledging Research Council funding to be made freely available through Gold or Green routes, supported by block-grant guidance issued to research organisations on eligible costs and embargo limits.
What was the UKRI open access review?
The UKRI open access review was a formal consultation process examining UKRI’s inherited RCUK-era policies to design a single, harmonised mandate. It engaged institutions, publishers and researchers, and its outcome was the 2022 UKRI open access policy that superseded all seven prior council-specific arrangements.
What are open access requirements under UKRI?
Current UKRI open access requirements mandate immediate access with no embargo for journal articles funded from 1 April 2022, a CC BY licence by default, and a Data Access Statement in every covered article, whether or not underlying data exists.
What this means for institutions filing compliance today
Research offices auditing historical outputs still need to apply RCUK-era rules — embargo periods, council-specific block-grant terms — to anything published before 1 April 2022, while applying the no-embargo UKRI standard to everything after. This dual-track reality means institutional repositories and current research information systems (CRIS) should retain the ability to flag which regime governed a given output, since RCUK-era Green deposits legitimately carried embargoes that would now be non-compliant under UKRI rules.
Because UKRI no longer requires a submitted spreadsheet, the burden has shifted from periodic reporting to continuous metadata hygiene: accurate funder acknowledgement, licence tagging and repository deposit timing now do the compliance work that the annual RCUK report used to do. Institutions should also note that the separate REF 2021 open access policy, which required AAM deposit within three months of acceptance, ran on its own track alongside RCUK and is expected to align more closely with UKRI’s approach under the successor REF exercise.
Conclusion: where UK open access reporting goes next
The transition from RCUK to UKRI did not add a new reporting layer — it removed one. The annual compliance spreadsheet that defined a decade of RCUK administration has been replaced by metadata-driven monitoring under a single UKRI policy shaped by cOAlition S’s Plan S principles. For institutions, the practical task now is less about filing a report and more about ensuring the underlying publication record is accurate enough that UKRI’s monitoring can find compliance without being told about it.
For research administrators managing legacy and current outputs side by side, understanding which policy era governs a given publication remains essential groundwork before any funder audit.
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