This policy sets out Cancer Research UK's (CRUK's) position on open access publications and how researchers and host institutions that receive funding from us are expected to provide open and unrestricted access to published research articles.
At CRUK, we believe that the best way of maximising the impact of the research we fund is to provide open and unrestricted access to published research articles. This facilitates rapid sharing of knowledge and promotes innovation, ultimately ensuring that patients can access better treatments sooner.
In all cases, CRUK encourages its researchers to select publishing routes that ensure the work is available immediately on publication in its final published form, wherever such options exist for their journal of choice that are compliant with the requirements set out below.
This policy applies to all CRUK-funded researchers, host institutions and funded collaborators in relation to original, primary research publications that are accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This applies to publications that have been supported, in whole or in part, by CRUK.
The policy does not apply to book chapters, monographs, editorials, reviews or conference proceedings.
This policy and its requirements relate to the publishing of research articles, please see CRUUK’s data sharing and management policy for requirements relating to the sharing of data that underlies the research articles.
A publication fee often association with publishing an article as open access.
The version of the paper which has been peer reviewed, revised by the authors and accepted for publication by the journal.
The Creative Commons attribution licence. This licence allows others to distribute, remix, tweak and build upon work – also commercially – provided they credit the author(s) for the original creation and clearly indicate that changes were made to the work, if any. CC BY 4.0 licence applies to the research article itself as a creative work and does not extend to the underlying data.
Europe PubMed Central is an open access repository of life sciences journal literature.
An open access publishing route whereby the final published version of a research article (version of record) is permanently and freely available online for anyone, anywhere to read. This can be in either a fully open access or hybrid journal.
A preprint is the version of the paper before being submitted for peer review.
Transformative agreements are agreements negotiated between a Host Institution and publishers that aim to transform scholarly publications from subscription-based business models to fully open access models.
The final, definitive, citable version of the paper which has been copyedited, typeset, had metadata applied, and has been allocated a persistent identifier, such as a DOI (digital object identifier).
If you have a research paper accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, you and your host institution must ensure that the following requirements are met:
i. An electronic copy of your paper must be made freely available in Europe PMC at the time of final publication.
ii. The open access version of your research paper must be published with a CC BY 4.0 licence, unless we have agreed, as an exception, to allow publication under a CC BYND licence.
iii. You must acknowledge CRUK funding in the funding acknowledgement section of the paper, using the format: This work was supported by CRUK [Cref./A ref. OR XXXX\123456]’) and, for trial results, the CRUK trial number.
iv. If your research has used patient data, you must use the patient data citation: https://understandingpatientdata.org.uk/data-citation
v. In line with our data sharing and management policy, you must include a data availability statement explaining how the data and software underlying the findings reported in the paper can be assessed by researchers and other users and use persistent DOIs to cite datasets.
The above requirements can be met through the following routes:
Publish in a fully open access or hybrid journal which makes the VoR freely available immediately on publication. Typically, the journal deposits the final publication in Europe PMC on the authors’ behalf.
Publish in a subscription journal and make the AAM (or VoR, where the journal permits) available immediately on publication. Typically, the author self-deposits the AAM on Europe PMC at the time of final publication.
Publish in a journal that has agreed a transformative agreement with your host institution.
CRUK provides funding for researchers to cover fair and reasonable open access publishing costs. CRUK researchers can meet costs for APC in the following ways:
Funds for APCs for researchers based at CRUK institutes, including the Francis Crick Institute, should be charged to the institute's core award.
The primary mechanism through which CRUK funds APCs to UK universities is via institutional block grants, which are allocated to host institutions annually. These universities have been selected based on our average annual grant spend at each location over the previous five financial years – other UK institutions are not eligible for block awards.
Researchers based at institutions in receipt of a block grant should apply to their office of information services or library to access these funds.
Please note that if the institution’s block grant is exhausted before the end of the grant period, CRUK is unfortunately not able to provide supplements. Further guidance is provided below.
CRUK researchers who are not based at a CRUK institute or are based at a host institution where the block grant has been exhausted may:
Pay for APCs using any available underspend on their active CRUK response-mode grant, or other funding sources.
Choose to publish in a journal that permits self-archiving of the AAM or VoR in Europe PMC.
Choose to publish in a journal that charges low or no publishing fees.
Please note, however, that publication costs must not be charged to response-mode grants where block grant funds are still available.
All CRUK-funded researchers are strongly encouraged to:
Post preprints of their work en route to peer review.
Publish them under a CC BY licence on a platform that is indexed in Europe PMC.
We believe that the peer review process adds significant value to research articles. Researchers must make sure that the article, after peer review, complies with our policy as outlined above.
As per CRUK’s grant conditions, researchers must provide the CRUK press team with a copy of all publications and conference abstracts arising from the grant activities at the time of submission for publication via the online manuscript submission form on CRUK’s website or press.office@cancer.org.uk. Any manuscripts and details will be held in the strictest confidence.
For any queries about this policy please contact: policies@cancer.org.uk.
For more information, please see the following documents/web pages:
