CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: research councils uk

  • RCUK Open Access Report: What Changed Under UKRI

    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?

    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.

  • UKRI Research Councils Explained: Who Funds What

    UKRI research councils are the seven discipline-specific funding bodies — AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC and STFC — that operate inside UK Research and Innovation alongside two non-research-council members, Research England and Innovate UK, making nine councils in total, each with its own funding remit, grant schemes and deadlines.

    UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is the non-departmental public body, sponsored by the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, that brings the UK’s seven discipline-based research councils together with Research England and Innovate UK under one funding umbrella. UKRI was established on 1 April 2018 under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, replacing the previous Research Councils UK coordinating arrangement.

    What is UKRI and why does it have nine councils, not seven?

    UKRI is a single strategic body, but it funds through nine constituent councils, not seven. This distinction trips up many administrators new to the UK system, because “research council” is often used loosely to mean any UKRI member body.

    Strictly, only seven of the nine are research councils: the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Medical Research Council (MRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Research England and Innovate UK complete the nine-council structure but are not classified as research councils — Research England funds and engages with English higher education providers, and Innovate UK is the UK’s national innovation agency for business-led projects. UKRI itself states plainly that it is “made up of seven research councils, Innovate UK and Research England.”

    Which are the seven discipline-specific research councils?

    Each research council funds a defined subject area, runs its own panels and deadlines, and in several cases operates national research facilities. The table below maps each council to its core remit and a representative funding activity.

    Council Acronym Core funding remit Representative activity
    Arts and Humanities Research Council AHRC Arts, humanities, creative and cultural industries Doctoral training partnerships; creative economy programmes
    Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BBSRC Biology, bioscience, food security, agri-tech Institute Strategic Programme grants; responsive-mode research grants
    Economic and Social Research Council ESRC Economics, social sciences, behavioural and human data science Research centres; Large Grants scheme
    Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council EPSRC Engineering, physical sciences, mathematics, computer science Programme Grants; Centres for Doctoral Training
    Medical Research Council MRC Human health, medical science, therapeutics Clinical Trials Units; MRC Units and Institutes
    Natural Environment Research Council NERC Environmental science, climate, geosciences, marine and polar research National Capability funding; independent research organisation grants
    Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC Astronomy, particle physics, space science, large-scale facilities Operates Diamond Light Source and the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

    The seven councils vary substantially in age and origin. MRC traces its roots to the Medical Research Committee of 1913, making it one of the world’s oldest continuously operating medical research funders. NERC was established under the Science and Technology Act 1965. BBSRC and EPSRC were both formed in 1994, when the former Science and Engineering Research Council split into subject-specific successors. STFC is the youngest, created in 2007 through the merger of the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.

    How do Research England and Innovate UK differ from the research councils?

    Research England and Innovate UK sit alongside the seven research councils inside UKRI but fund on a different basis. Research England distributes quality-related (QR) block-grant funding to English universities to sustain their research base, rather than funding individual investigator-led projects through competitive calls in the way the research councils do. Innovate UK, formerly the Technology Strategy Board before its 2014 rebrand, funds business-led innovation and commercialisation rather than academic discovery research.

    A further jurisdictional nuance matters for institutional administrators: Research England funds only higher education providers in England. Equivalent research and knowledge-exchange funding for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is administered separately by the Scottish Funding Council, Medr (the Welsh tertiary education and research body, formerly HEFCW) and the Department for the Economy Northern Ireland respectively — none of which are UKRI councils. Administrators at devolved-nation institutions therefore need to look outside UKRI entirely for their equivalent of Research England funding, a distinction that UKRI’s own council-listing pages do not spell out.

    How do administrators identify the right council for a proposal?

    Most proposals map cleanly to a single council by discipline, but interdisciplinary projects often span two or more remits. UKRI runs its own Funding Finder as a single entry point across all nine councils and cross-council calls, which is the most reliable way to check current opportunities and deadlines rather than relying on an individual council’s page alone.

    • Identify the dominant discipline of the proposal first, then check whether a secondary council co-funds cross-disciplinary calls in that area.
    • Use UKRI’s Funding Finder rather than a single council website, since cross-council and strategic-priority calls are listed centrally.
    • Check facility-access routes (for example, STFC-operated national facilities) separately from standard grant calls, as these often have distinct access panels.
    • For projects based wholly in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, confirm whether the relevant funding stream sits with a UKRI research council or with the devolved funding body instead.

    Since UKRI’s formation in 2018, the previous Research Councils UK collaborative structure has been superseded by UKRI’s own cross-council strategic funds, which administrators should treat as the current mechanism for genuinely interdisciplinary proposals rather than assuming each council operates in isolation.

    UKRI research councils: frequently asked questions

    What are the 7 research councils?

    The seven research councils are AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC and STFC. Each funds a distinct discipline area — from arts and humanities to physics and space science — and operates its own grant schemes, panels and deadlines within the wider nine-council UKRI structure.

    How many councils are there in UKRI?

    UKRI has nine councils in total: the seven discipline-specific research councils plus Research England and Innovate UK. Only the first seven are formally described as research councils; the remaining two fund higher-education block grants and business-led innovation respectively.

    Is the Medical Research Council part of UKRI?

    Yes. The Medical Research Council has operated as one of UKRI’s seven research councils since UKRI’s creation in April 2018. MRC retains its own identity, funding schemes and Units and Institutes, but sits within the wider UKRI structure alongside the other eight councils.

    What research areas does UKRI support?

    UKRI supports research and innovation across all academic disciplines, spanning medical and biological sciences, physics, astronomy, chemistry, engineering, environmental science, economics and the social sciences, and the arts and humanities, plus business-led innovation through Innovate UK and university research capacity through Research England.

    What this means for institutional administrators

    For research administrators new to the UK funding system, the practical takeaway is definitional precision: “UKRI research councils” and “UKRI councils” are not interchangeable. Grant terms, eligibility rules, open-access mandates and reporting requirements can differ by council even where UKRI sets shared overarching policy, so proposal teams should confirm the specific council’s current guidance rather than assuming uniform rules apply across all nine.

    As UKRI continues to run cross-council strategic funds alongside each council’s individual schemes, administrators supporting interdisciplinary bids should expect proposal routing to involve more than one council’s process — and should build that into internal costing and sign-off timelines accordingly.