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Research funders' open access policies |
Medical Research Council (MRC)
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JULIET and Support for Open Access to Research 
Publications Policies
To maximise the dissemination of the research they fund, the grant conditions of funding organisations increasingly require peer-reviewed research outputs to be made freely available to the public in full at the earliest possible date. These aims can be achieved either by archiving publications in an Open Access repository, or by publishing in an Open Access publication. JULIET assigns Open Access ticks (
) for the key conditions that should ideally be met for each type of policy. If a policy fails to meet a key condition, a dash (
) is shown instead.
Self-Archiving
The ideal publications archiving policy has three key parts:
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Whether to archive: | Deposit required | to be made available free of charge without any access restrictions |
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What to archive: | The full final version | the published version or the author's final peer-reviewed version |
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When to archive: | When accepted for publication | although toleration of publishers' embargos negates this |
Open Access Publishing
As an alternative to archiving, some funders accept publication of articles in Open Access journals or in hybrid journals, which may require an additional payment to the publisher for the article to be made Open Access immediately on the date of publication. Accordingly, JULIET assigns an Open Access tick () if the policy requires open access publishing.
Data Archiving Policies
Funding organisations are also increasingly requiring grantees to deposit their raw research data in appropriate public archives or stores, in order to facilitate the validation of results and further work by other researchers. The practicalities of providing access to large data-sets can be costly for data archives. Therefore, an Open Access tick may still be given if the archive recovers the costs of access provision on a not-for-profit basis.
Because it can take some time to write up results after a work has been completed, policies may allow a reasonable period of grace during which the original researchers have exclusive access to the data before it has to be deposited in a public archive. The lengths of such periods vary by subject discipline. For instance six months might be suitable for a chemistry project, but an archaeological dig could require several years. However, there clearly needs to be an outer limit.
JULIET assigns up to two Open Access ticks for data archiving policies:
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Data archiving is required. |
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Data must be deposited within five years. |
Statistical Analysis
For an indication of how UK research funders have implemented Open Access policies and level of funds affected, please see: Selected research funders' grant expenditure.
Updates and Feedback
The information in JULIET is updated by community contributions. If a funding organisation with an open access or data archiving policy is not listed here, please tell us about it via our Notification Form. Alternatively, please submit any updates or feedback by email to the JULIET Administrators (juliet@sherpa.ac.uk).
JULIET complements the RoMEO service provided by SHERPA for authors and repository administrators, which lists summaries of publishers' copyright transfer agreements as they relate to archiving. Further information on Open Access is available for authors, including links to contacts and repositories which may be able to take eprints to fulfil funders' requirements and recommendations. Further information on repositories is available from OpenDOAR.
Further information about RoMEO & JULIET [PDF files] - Leaflet | Large Poster (A1) | Small Poster (A3)
With grateful thanks to CURL for funding JULIET development.