The policy was updated in April 2026 with the following changes:
Section 1, 2, 3, 4.1, 4.2, change in wording
Section 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, addition of wording around embargo period
Section 4.3, change in policy regarding our funding of publication costs
Section 6, removed document link to guidance on our support for transformative agreements
Other minor clarifications
This policy sets out our position on open access publications and how researchers and host institutions that receive our funding are encouraged to provide open and unrestricted access to published research articles.
We believe that where possible, 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, we encourage researchers to select publishing routes that ensure the work is available immediately on publication in its final published form.
This policy applies to all 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 us. The policy does not apply to book chapters, monographs, editorials, reviews or conference proceedings. This policy relates to the publishing of research articles, please see our Data sharing and management policy for requirements relating to the sharing of data that underlies the research articles.
Author accepted manuscript (AAM) | The version of the paper which has been peer reviewed, revised by the authors and accepted for publication by the journal. |
CCBY 4.0 licence | The Creative Commons attribution licence. The 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 (Europe PMC) | An open access repository of life sciences journal literature. |
Preprint | A preprint is the version of the paper before being submitted for peer review. |
Transformative agreement | 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. |
Version of record (VoR) | 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 digital object identifier (DOI). |
If you have a research paper accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, we expect that you and your host institution adhere to the following points:
An electronic copy of your paper must be made freely available in Europe PMC. This should be immediately at publication, or no later than six months after publication if an embargo is applied. An embargo longer than six months is not compliant.
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 BY-ND licence.
You must acknowledge funding from us in the funding acknowledgement section of the paper, using the format: This work was supported by Cancer Research UK [Cref./A ref. OR XXXX\123456]’) and, for trial results, the Cancer Research UK trial number.
If your research has used patient data, you must use the patient data citation: https://understandingpatientdata.org.uk/data-citation
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 points 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 no later than six months after publication. Typically, the author self-deposits the AAM on Europe PMC.
Publish in a journal that has agreed a transformative agreement with your host institution.
We have previously supported open access publishing costs through institutional block grants, our Institutes’ core grants, and the use of grant underspend. No further financial support will be provided for this and from 1 October 2026, open access costs will no longer be eligible for support from us.
However, we strongly encourage all funded researchers to make their work available open access. Affected researchers may do the following:
Choose to publish in a journal that permits self-archiving of the AAM or VoR in Europe PMC. If required, a six-month embargo is allowed.
Choose to publish in a journal that charges low or no publishing fees.
Publish in a journal that has a transformative agreement with your host institution.
All of our 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 our grant conditions, researchers must provide our Press team with a copy of all publications and conference abstracts arising from the grant activities at the time of submission for publication via our online manuscript submission form or by contacting 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 webpages and documents:
