In line with the UK government’s commitment to open access to publicly-funded research, additional funding will be provided to the top 30 research-intensive institutions in the UK to help the transition to open access and compliance with the new Research Councils UK (RCUK) Open Access Policy.
The new RCUK policy states that all published research articles and conference proceedings funded by the RCUK from 1 April 2013 must be open access. While the RCUK still supports open access via self-archiving (‘green OA’), the policy aims to make it easier for UK institutions and researchers to publish in fully or hybrid open access journals (‘gold OA’). A fully or hybrid open access journal is recognized as being compliant with their policy if it publishes under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.