CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: bbsrc open access policy

  • UKRI Open Access Block Grant: How It Works

    The UKRI open access block grant is an annual allocation UK Research and Innovation pays to eligible research organisations to help them meet the costs of complying with UKRI’s open access policy for research articles. It is not paid to individual researchers, and it is separate from — and administered differently to — the wider RCUK/Plan S open access mandate debate. This guide explains how the allocation is calculated, what it can and cannot fund, and what institutions must now report back to UKRI.

    A UKRI open access block grant is a lump-sum award, calculated from an institution’s UKRI-funded research volume, that research organisations distribute internally to cover open access publication costs rather than a grant researchers apply for directly.

    How is the UKRI block grant calculated and paid?

    UKRI does not divide a fixed pot equally between universities. Instead, the amount an organisation receives is calculated using an algorithm that uses directly incurred and directly allocated staff costs on UKRI awards as a proxy for research volume, according to UKRI’s own open access funding and reporting guidance. Institutions with a very small UKRI research footprint may receive nothing at all.

    For administrative reasons, only organisations whose calculated entitlement is £5,000 or more are offered an award. Every block grant allocated from 2022 onwards is published on UKRI’s Gateway to Research service, giving institutions and auditors a transparent, checkable record of what each organisation received and when.

    Payment is not a single annual cheque. Under the 2025–26 block grant terms and conditions, the grant covering 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026 is paid via the EPSRC Research grants pay run process in four quarterly instalments, mirroring the cash-flow pattern of a standard research grant rather than a one-off subvention. UKRI’s own figures put total block grant spend at approximately £40 million per year across the research-article scheme, separate from the long-form publications fund described below.

    What can the block grant fund — and what can’t it fund?

    The block grant is deliberately flexible. Research organisations can spend it on any activity that supports compliance with UKRI’s open access policy, not just article processing charges (APCs). UKRI’s terms and conditions and the sector guidance built around them (for example Jisc’s publisher-facing compliance guide) converge on a consistent list of eligible and ineligible spend.

    • Eligible: APCs for fully open access journals and platforms.
    • Eligible: the “publish” element of Jisc-approved transitional (read-and-publish) agreements.
    • Eligible: membership or participation fees for alternative open access models, such as subscribe-to-open schemes.
    • Eligible: repository and green-route infrastructure costs, and staff time spent administering compliance, deposit checking and the block grant itself.
    • Not eligible: APCs for hybrid journals outside an approved transitional agreement.
    • Not eligible: page charges and colour charges.
    • Not eligible: long-form outputs — monographs, book chapters and edited collections sit under a separate, dedicated £3.5 million UKRI open access fund with its own caps (up to £10,000 for a book processing charge, £1,000 for a chapter processing charge, and £6,000 for participation in an alternative open access model, rising by a further £3,000 where an organisation has two or more eligible outputs in a period).

    Researchers cannot normally claim these costs directly from their research grant budget; the block grant exists precisely so that publication costs are pooled and administered centrally by the research organisation rather than budgeted line-by-line inside every award.

    How does UKRI’s grant compare with Wellcome, CRUK and BHF?

    Institutional open access teams frequently administer several funders’ block grants side by side, and confusion between them is a real, current problem. In particular, Cancer Research UK is winding down its own open access block grant from 1 April 2026, with a new CRUK policy taking effect on 1 October 2026 under which CRUK will no longer pay for open access publishing at all. That change concerns CRUK’s scheme only — it does not alter UKRI’s block grant, its eligibility rules or its payment schedule, though several university library guides bundle the funders together in ways that can make the two easy to conflate.

    Funder Scheme status (mid-2026) Hybrid journals covered? Repository deposit required?
    UKRI Ongoing annual block grant, ~£40m/year Only within Jisc-approved transitional agreements Europe PMC deposit required for MRC/BBSRC-funded articles
    Wellcome Ongoing; DOAJ-listed journals only No Europe PMC deposit required; rights retention statement required
    Cancer Research UK Ending — no APC funding after 1 October 2026 N/A (scheme closing) N/A
    British Heart Foundation Ongoing Yes, for original articles Europe PMC deposit required

    For research administrators, the practical takeaway is to treat each funder’s block grant as a distinct compliance stream with its own terms, rather than assuming a single institutional “open access fund” rulebook covers all of them.

    What are institutions’ reporting and assurance duties?

    Reporting obligations on the UKRI block grant have tightened materially for the 2026–27 cycle. Research organisations must already provide high-level information about their block grant spend through their Final Expenditure Statement, the same mechanism used for standard UKRI grant financial reporting, and block grant expenditure now falls within scope of UKRI’s Funding Assurance Reviews. Institutions need governance, financial and risk-management processes capable of demonstrating that funds were used for their intended purpose if selected for review.

    The most significant near-term change is that UKRI is reintroducing dedicated block grant reporting in 2026 to 2027 through a co-developed, lightweight, standardised template, explicitly designed to close evidence gaps around what institutions actually spend the money on. This marks a shift away from the lighter-touch, largely self-certified approach that has applied since the block grant scheme was last simplified, and research offices should expect to log spend by category (APCs, transitional agreements, repository costs, staff time) in a form that maps to that template rather than an internal ad hoc breakdown.

    1. Confirm which team owns block grant financial tracking (library, research office, or finance).
    2. Categorise 2026–27 spend against UKRI’s eligible-cost list as it is incurred, not retrospectively.
    3. Retain invoices and journal/agreement documentation in case of a Funding Assurance Review.
    4. Complete the Final Expenditure Statement and the new standardised reporting template on time.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What is the UKRI block grant policy?

    The UKRI open access block grant policy gives eligible UK research organisations an annual lump sum, sized to their UKRI-funded research volume, to cover eligible open access publication costs for research articles. It is administered by the institution, not claimed per-article from a researcher’s own grant.

    How is the UKRI block grant amount calculated?

    UKRI uses an algorithm based on directly incurred and directly allocated staff costs charged to UKRI awards as a proxy for an organisation’s research volume. Only organisations whose calculated entitlement reaches £5,000 or more are actually offered a grant.

    Do researchers apply for the UKRI block grant directly?

    No. Researchers do not apply to UKRI for block grant funding. The research organisation receives and administers the award, and individual authors instead request an APC payment or transitional-agreement cover through their own institution’s open access team.

    Do institutions have to report block grant spending to UKRI?

    Yes. Institutions must summarise spend through the Final Expenditure Statement, and block grants are now included within Funding Assurance Reviews. From 2026–27, a new standardised reporting template is being reintroduced specifically to capture more granular cost evidence.

    What this means for research administrators

    The direction of travel is towards more visibility, not less. A scheme that has run for over a decade on light-touch institutional discretion is moving into a period where UKRI wants comparable, standardised cost data across the sector. Institutions that build 2026–27 spend-tracking around UKRI’s eligible-cost categories now, rather than retrofitting records later, will find the reintroduced reporting template far less disruptive.

    Research administration teams should also keep the funder distinctions in this guide close at hand: UKRI’s own scheme continues on broadly the same basis it has run under since 2022, even as other funders in the same open access landscape — Cancer Research UK most visibly — withdraw block grant support altogether. Conflating the two risks under-claiming funding UKRI still provides, or over-promising APC cover a funder such as CRUK will no longer honour after October 2026.

  • Transformative Agreements End: Diamond OA Pivot Under cOAlition S 2026–2030 Strategy

    cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 strategy, published 12 November 2025, confirms that transformative agreements no longer sit at the centre of its open access policy: funders will not fund new transformative agreements by default (a position effective since 2025), and the coalition is redirecting policy attention and infrastructure investment toward diamond open access, preprints, and publish-review-curate models. For library consortia and research offices still budgeting around read-and-publish renewals, this is the point at which planning assumptions need to change.

    A transformative agreement is a contract negotiated between a library, national consortium, or regional grouping and a publisher that repurposes former subscription spending into payment for open access publishing services, intended as a temporary bridge from subscription access to a fully open access system rather than a permanent settlement.

    What Changed in cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 Strategy

    cOAlition S confirmed the end of its financial support for open access publishing under transformative arrangements after 31 December 2024, a position it first announced on 26 January 2023 and formalised in the Plan S Implementation Guidance. From 2025, participating funders stopped treating a transformative agreement as automatically compliant with Plan S; authors must instead demonstrate compliance through full open access publication, an independently negotiated agreement meeting transparency criteria, or rights retention.

    The coalition’s Strategy 2026–2030, released 12 November 2025, builds on that withdrawal rather than reversing it. The document sets three strategic priorities: strengthening the foundations of full, immediate, sustainable, and equitable open access (including a review of the Plan S principles to give explicit weight to publish-review-curate models, diamond open access, and preprints); supporting the digital infrastructures that make open access sustainable; and exploring financially sustainable, equitable publishing systems with formal monitoring of policy impact.

    Implementation runs in two phases: an initial two-year period from 2026 to 2027, followed by 2028–2030, with second-phase priorities to be set by the coalition’s Leaders Group based on what the first phase delivers. The coalition itself has grown considerably during this period, from 12 founding organisations at Plan S’s 2018 launch to 28 funders spanning Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa, and Australia.

    Why cOAlition S Is Moving Away From Transformative Agreements

    cOAlition S’s own reasoning is explicit: continuing to fund transformative arrangements indefinitely risked making them permanent, which the coalition has stated would perpetuate the hybrid open access model it has consistently opposed. Individual funders retain discretion to keep supporting transformative agreements as part of national strategies, and any such exceptions are published on the cOAlition S website, but this is now framed as an exception rather than the default route.

    Independent data on open access growth supports the coalition’s case that the market has moved on from where it stood when transformative agreements were designed. According to the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), the share of articles, reviews, and conference papers published immediately as gold open access rose from 14% in 2014 to 40% in 2024, while the subscription-only share fell from 70% to 54% over the same decade. Gold open access, funded through article processing charges, is now the dominant open route — which is precisely the outcome the coalition says has intensified concerns about cost and equity, and pushed diamond open access up its agenda.

    Lidia Borrell-Damián, chair of the cOAlition S executive steering group and Secretary General of Science Europe, has summarised the shift directly: “We are trying to shift the market towards more diverse, sustainable approaches.” Not every commentator reads the pivot the same way. Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and a co-founder of the preprint server bioRxiv, has argued that Plan S has gone from being “fairly specific” — originally focused on flipping subscription journals through transformative agreements — to “rather vague,” now spanning preprints, alternative peer review, and diamond open access simultaneously.

    Open access route Who typically pays cOAlition S funder support, 2026–2030
    Transformative agreement (read & publish) Library or consortium, bundled with subscription Not funded as a default compliance route since 2025; national exceptions only
    Gold open access (APC) Author, institution, or funder, per article Recognised route; cost and equity impacts now formally monitored
    Rights retention (green OA + CC BY manuscript) No publishing fee; repository deposit Default compliance mechanism where no other route applies
    Diamond/platinum open access Universities, societies, funders, consortia infrastructure Named strategic priority; principles review and infrastructure investment
    Publish-review-curate (PRC) / preprints Funder or community infrastructure Included in the 2026–2027 principles review

    What Library Consortia and Research Offices Need to Renegotiate

    Consortia that built multi-year budgets around transformative agreement renewals now need to treat those renewals as contestable rather than routine. The practical work falls into a small number of categories.

    • Audit existing transformative agreements against cOAlition S’s current compliance rules, and flag which corresponding authors and grants are affected by the loss of default recognition.
    • Reopen consortium-level negotiations with publishers whose transformative agreements are approaching renewal, testing whether an independently negotiated, transparent read-and-publish deal or a conversion to full open access better serves the portfolio.
    • Reallocate a share of subscription and APC budgets toward diamond open access infrastructure — journal platforms, society publishing services, and consortium-run funds — in line with cOAlition S’s stated 2026–2027 priority of supporting digital publishing infrastructure.
    • Strengthen rights retention workflows so that manuscript deposit with a CC BY licence happens at submission, since this remains the fallback compliance route wherever a transformative agreement no longer applies.
    • Track the ESAC Initiative’s transformative agreement registry and national consortium reporting to benchmark negotiating positions against comparable institutions rather than negotiating in isolation.

    Institutions with mature identifier and metadata infrastructure — ORCID, DataCite, and CrossRef records consistently linked to funder awards — are better placed to demonstrate compliance under this more fragmented set of routes than institutions still relying on a publisher-reported transformative agreement dashboard.

    Answer-First Q&A: Transformative Agreements and Diamond Open Access

    What is a transformative agreement?

    A transformative agreement is an umbrella term, defined by the ESAC Initiative, for contracts negotiated between institutions and publishers that repurpose former subscription expenditure to remunerate publishers for open access publishing services, gradually shifting the underlying business model from toll access toward open access.

    What is a transformative journal?

    A transformative journal is a subscription or hybrid journal that commits to a defined trajectory toward full open access, including a rising share of open access content and offsetting subscription income against publishing fees. cOAlition S also withdrew financial recognition of this route after 2024.

    What is diamond open access?

    Diamond (or platinum) open access describes journals and platforms that charge no fee to either authors or readers, with publishing costs instead covered by universities, scholarly societies, funders, or library consortia. It is a named strategic priority in cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 strategy.

    Is a transformative agreement still Plan S compliant?

    A transformative agreement can still satisfy Plan S if it is published on an individual funder’s list of recognised exceptions for national strategies; otherwise, cOAlition S no longer treats it as automatically compliant, and authors must use full open access, an approved independent agreement, or rights retention instead.

    Implications and What Comes Next

    The near-term implication is budgetary and administrative: consortia negotiating transformative agreement renewals in 2026 and 2027 should expect publishers to resist unwinding these deals, since they remain commercially attractive, even as funder recognition narrows. The medium-term implication is structural: cOAlition S’s own strategy explicitly ties future funding priorities to diamond open access and shared infrastructure, meaning consortium budgets that continue flowing entirely through subscription-linked read-and-publish deals will increasingly diverge from where funder policy is heading.

    The second phase of the strategy, from 2028 to 2030, is not yet fixed; cOAlition S’s Leaders Group will set those priorities based on what the 2026–2027 principles review and infrastructure investments actually deliver. Institutions that use the next two years to build diamond open access contributions, tighten rights-retention deposit workflows, and maintain clean, linked identifier metadata will be negotiating from a position of readiness rather than catching up once the second phase is confirmed.

    See the CASRAI Dictionary for definitions of related open access and compliance terms, and the CASRAI research administration hub for broader compliance and infrastructure guidance.

  • Wellcome Trust Grants vs CRUK: Compliance Guide

    Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK (CRUK) are both major UK charitable research funders, but their grant governance rules diverge sharply: Wellcome funds open-access (OA) publishing costs only in fully open-access venues, while CRUK stopped funding OA publishing costs entirely from 1 October 2026, pushing researchers toward the green (repository) route instead. Reporting cadences and data-sharing expectations also differ in structure, though both track outputs through Researchfish.

    A wellcome trust grants award and a CRUK award are governed by two separate rulebooks, and institutions holding both must satisfy each on its own terms rather than assuming a single compliance workflow covers both funders.

    Overview: two funders, two rulebooks

    Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation established in 1936 that funds biomedical and health research; Cancer Research UK is a charity dedicated exclusively to cancer research, prevention and treatment. Both sit outside UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and therefore set their own grant conditions rather than following the UKRI open access policy by default.

    Institutions that hold grants from both — a common scenario in UK medical schools and cancer centres — cannot treat “funder compliance” as a single checklist. Wellcome and CRUK differ on when open access funding is available, how data-sharing plans are assessed, and which portal is used for annual reporting.

    What open access rules apply to Wellcome and CRUK grants?

    Wellcome’s open access policy, updated 2 January 2025, applies to all original research articles submitted for publication after 1 January 2021. It requires immediate deposit in Europe PMC under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, with a CC BY-ND exception available only case-by-case. Since 1 January 2025, Wellcome funds article processing charges (APCs) only for publication in fully open-access journals or platforms — it no longer supports hybrid-journal APCs.

    CRUK’s position has since moved further away from direct OA funding. In a policy update announced 1 April 2026, CRUK confirmed it will no longer provide financial support for open access publishing costs from 1 October 2026, citing a projected saving of £5.2 million over three years. CRUK-funded researchers are instead directed to the green route: depositing the author-accepted manuscript in a repository such as Europe PMC within six months of publication, under a CC BY 4.0 licence for the deposited version.

    • Wellcome: gold/fully-OA route funded via block grants and Wellcome Open Research; CC BY required; immediate deposit.
    • CRUK: green route only from October 2026; no institutional block grant or underspend funding for APCs; six-month embargo permitted on the deposited manuscript.

    How do data sharing requirements differ?

    Both funders require a data-sharing plan at application stage, but they weight it differently in the funding decision. Wellcome asks applicants for an outputs management plan covering data, software and materials, and expects data underpinning a publication to be available at the time that publication appears, with fewer restrictions where possible; data related to public health emergencies must be shared on an accelerated timeline.

    CRUK requires a data management and sharing plan as a scored component of the application review itself, with a stated expectation that data be released no later than acceptance of the paper reporting the main findings. Both funders require consent documentation that anticipates future data sharing, reflecting alignment with FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles used across UK biomedical funding.

    What are the reporting deadlines and systems?

    Wellcome grantholders submit annual progress reports through the Wellcome Funding platform, plus end-of-grant reports; for award types ending on or before September 2026, end-of-grant reporting runs through Researchfish. Wellcome also requires separate annual reporting on intellectual property and commercialisation activity where relevant.

    CRUK manages grant applications and administration through its Flexi-Grant portal — the same underlying system used by several other UK funders, including the Royal Society and the British Academy — and uses Researchfish for annual output reporting. CRUK-funded researchers must submit a Researchfish return every year the award is active and for three consecutive years after the award ends, a longer post-award tail than Wellcome applies to most schemes. Missing a submission window can affect eligibility for future funding from either organisation.

    Side-by-side comparison

    Governance area Wellcome Trust Cancer Research UK
    Open access funding Funds APCs in fully open-access venues only (since 1 Jan 2025) No OA funding of any kind from 1 Oct 2026
    Default compliance route Gold/fully-OA, immediate deposit Green route, 6-month embargo permitted
    Required licence CC BY (CC BY-ND by exception) CC BY 4.0 on deposited manuscript
    Data plan required at Application (outputs management plan) Application (scored data management & sharing plan)
    Grant admin portal Wellcome Funding platform Flexi-Grant
    Output reporting system Researchfish (most schemes, to Sept 2026) Researchfish, annually + 3 years post-award

    Answer-first Q&A

    Where does Wellcome Trust funding come from?

    Wellcome Trust’s endowment originates from the estate of pharmaceutical entrepreneur Sir Henry Wellcome, built on the Burroughs Wellcome (later Wellcome Foundation) pharmaceutical business. The Trust sold its remaining stake in Wellcome plc to the public in the 1990s and now funds research from investment income on that endowment, independent of government or industry grants.

    How do I contact Wellcome Trust about funding?

    Funding-specific queries should go to [email protected], the address Wellcome designates for applicant and grantholder questions. General enquiries route through Wellcome’s main contact channels, but funding support has its own dedicated inbox to keep response times predictable for active applicants.

    Who is eligible for a Wellcome Career Development Award?

    A Wellcome Career Development Award targets mid-career researchers ready to lead a substantial, innovative research programme. Applicants must demonstrate they can generate a significant shift in understanding within their field and typically need an existing track record of independent or semi-independent research output.

    Implications for research administrators

    Institutions running co-funded projects — for example, a cancer biology programme with both Wellcome and CRUK support — need two separate compliance calendars, not one. The CRUK OA funding withdrawal effective October 2026 shifts real cost onto institutional library budgets or block grants for any CRUK-funded output that cannot clear a six-month green embargo, while Wellcome retains a funded gold-OA pathway. Research offices should map which grants sit under which policy before setting a single “institutional OA workflow,” since applying Wellcome’s rules to a CRUK-funded paper — or vice versa — risks a compliance breach that is grounds for withholding future funding.

    Reporting also needs separate tracking: CRUK’s three-year post-award Researchfish tail outlasts most Wellcome end-of-grant obligations, so a grant closed on paper may still carry an active reporting duty. Building funder-specific reminders into grants-management systems — rather than a single generic “reporting due” flag — is the practical safeguard against missed submissions and the funding-eligibility penalties both organisations attach to them.

  • MRC and BBSRC Open Access Policy: How UKRI’s Research Councils Diverge

    Grant administrators handling awards that straddle more than one UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) council quickly discover that “one policy” does not mean “one set of instructions.” The MRC open access policy and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) open access policy both sit inside UKRI’s single overarching open access framework, yet the Medical Research Council (MRC) and BBSRC apply distinct additional expectations around Europe PMC deposit, embargo language and preprint citation. For institutions administering multi-council grants, those gaps — not the shared UKRI baseline — are where compliance actually breaks down.

    The shared UKRI foundation

    Since 1 April 2022, UKRI has run a single open access policy covering peer-reviewed research articles, conference papers and reviews acknowledging funding from any of its seven councils, including MRC and BBSRC. From 1 January 2024 the policy extended to monographs, book chapters and edited collections, requiring open access within 12 months of publication.

    For journal articles, the UKRI policy sets out two routes to compliance:

    • Route 1 (Gold): the publisher’s version of record is made immediately open access, typically under a CC BY licence.
    • Route 2 (Green): the author’s accepted manuscript is deposited in a repository and made immediately available at the point of publication.

    Both MRC and BBSRC researchers must comply with this baseline. The divergence begins with what each council layers on top of it.

    How MRC and BBSRC diverge in practice

    MRC’s own policy page states plainly that funded researchers are “expected to comply” with the UKRI policy and must ensure a copy of every in-scope publication is deposited in Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) at the time of final publication — a requirement MRC treats as mandatory, with a named contact ([email protected]) for compliance queries.

    BBSRC’s published guidance, by contrast, frames Europe PMC archiving as something researchers are “strongly encouraged” to do rather than an enforced condition, and separately states that BBSRC-funded results must be made freely available “no later than six months from the formal date of publication” — language that sits alongside, rather than fully aligned with, UKRI’s 2022 immediate-access requirement. In practice this means MRC administrators treat Europe PMC deposit as a hard compliance gate, while BBSRC administrators are working from softer, less current wording.

    Requirement MRC BBSRC
    Base policy UKRI open access policy UKRI open access policy
    Europe PMC deposit Required, tied to funding terms and conditions Strongly encouraged, not stated as mandatory
    Stated access timeline Immediate, per UKRI policy Guidance still references a 6-month freely-available window
    Preprints in applications Accepted, subject to MRC preprints policy Accepted; must carry a DOI and be under 5 years old
    Block grant / OA funding route UKRI block grant plus institutional strategic funding UKRI block grant plus a dedicated BBSRC Open Access Grant for strategically funded institutes

    The block grant distinction matters for multi-council awards: a BBSRC-funded institute receiving strategic funding is eligible for a separate BBSRC Open Access Grant on top of the standard UKRI block grant allocation, whereas MRC funding does not carry an equivalent parallel grant line. Administrators reconciling publication costs across a joint MRC–BBSRC award therefore need to identify which funding pot a given article’s costs should be drawn from, rather than assuming a single shared allocation.

    Common questions from grant administrators

    What is the MRC open access policy?

    The MRC open access policy requires researchers funded by the Medical Research Council to comply with the overarching UKRI open access policy and to deposit a copy of every in-scope publication in Europe PMC at the time of final publication, whether via the gold or green route.

    Does BBSRC require Europe PMC deposit?

    BBSRC’s guidance encourages researchers to archive published articles in Europe PMC but does not state this as a mandatory condition in the way MRC does, making it a softer compliance expectation that administrators should still track for biomedical-adjacent outputs.

    What is the difference between MRC and BBSRC open access requirements?

    Both follow the same UKRI baseline, but MRC treats Europe PMC deposit as compulsory while BBSRC treats it as encouraged, and BBSRC’s own guidance still references a six-month access window that predates UKRI’s 2022 immediate-access requirement.

    Will REF 2029 use the same open access policy as UKRI?

    The UK’s four higher education funding bodies have signalled that REF 2029 open access requirements will move closer to the UKRI framework, including extending expectations to long-form outputs, but REF policy is set separately from UKRI’s council-level rules and administrators should not assume identical scope or timing.

    REF 2029 open access alignment

    The Research Excellence Framework is administered by the four UK higher education funding bodies — Research England, the Scottish Funding Council, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland — not by UKRI’s research councils directly. For REF 2021, the open access policy applied to journal articles and conference proceedings, with a deposit window measured from acceptance rather than publication.

    For REF 2029, the funding bodies have indicated closer alignment with UKRI’s current policy, including bringing long-form outputs such as monographs into scope in a manner consistent with UKRI’s January 2024 monograph requirement. For a multi-council award spanning MRC and BBSRC funding, this means outputs already compliant with the UKRI open access route are well placed for REF eligibility, but administrators should confirm the specific REF 2029 rules once published rather than relying on UKRI compliance as an automatic proxy.

    Implications for multi-council award administrators

    The practical risk on a joint MRC–BBSRC grant is not non-compliance with the UKRI baseline — most institutions have that workflow embedded — but under-tracking the council-specific layer on top of it. Three things follow from the comparison above:

    1. Treat Europe PMC deposit as mandatory for any output acknowledging MRC funding, and as strongly recommended (verify locally) for BBSRC-only outputs.
    2. Do not assume a single open access funding pot covers a joint award; check whether the receiving institute holds a BBSRC Open Access Grant in addition to its UKRI block grant.
    3. Flag REF 2029 scope changes as a live item rather than a fixed rule, since final funding-body guidance may extend beyond the current UKRI monograph policy.

    Institutions supporting research administration across multiple UKRI councils benefit from building compliance checklists that separate “UKRI-wide” requirements from “council-specific” additions, rather than treating open access as a single monolithic policy. As REF 2029 guidance solidifies and UKRI continues its open access policy review, the gap between MRC’s stricter Europe PMC language and BBSRC’s older embargo wording is the clearest signal that “UKRI open access policy” is a floor, not a uniform standard — and that administrators verifying terminology such as gold, green and embargo routes should consult a maintained research administration dictionary alongside each council’s primary source.