National Institute for Health Research

Peer-reviewed research articles, including reviews not commissioned by publishers and conference papers accepted for final publication in a journal, or a publishing platform, submitted for publication on or after 1 June 2022 arising from:

• NIHR Programmes, NIHR Personal Awards and NIHR Global Health Research Portfolio: Research studies where the research costs are funded in whole or in part by the NIHR. 
• For NIHR Infrastructure (including NIHR research units and schools): Research studies where the majority of the research costs are funded by the NIHR.

Peer-reviewed research articles which are otherwise out of scope but which acknowledge NIHR support/funding, must be deposited and made freely accessible through Europe PMC, no later than 12 months after the final publication date.

• Personal awards that do not fund research are out of scope of this policy.
• Monographs (with the exception of NIHR Journals Library publications), book chapters, edited collections, or forms of non-peer-reviewed material.
• Pre-prints are out of scope, however NIHR may require the use of preprints in the context of emergencies.
• Reviews commissioned by publishers
• Study protocols

So that your work meets the revised OA policy, and is OA immediately on publication, without any embargo period, the options you have are to:

Publish under a CC-BY licence in a journal included in one of SGUL’s read and publish deals (eligibility terms and conditions apply, please see our Paying Open Access Fees web page for more information). For many, there is no OA fee to pay, for some, a discount is applied with a portion of the OA fee remaining to be paid (see FAQ 6 & 7 below).

Publish in a subscription journal without paying an open access fee

Include a rights retention statement on submissions (see 4 below for wording)  so that your final accepted MS can be made openly available without an embargo (and for an overview have a look at our Library webpage on rights retention).

Publish on the NIHR Open Research publishing platform

NIHR have a publishing platform which will allow for researchers to make available to everyone the findings of their projects not published elsewhere, NIHR Open Research.

An article processing charge (APC) will be charged, cost depends on the article type. 

• Acknowledge your NIHR funding: please follow the NIHR guidance on how this should be done. 

• If submitting to a subscription journal, you must include the following rights retention statement text in the funding acknowledgement section of the manuscript and any cover letter/note accompanying the submission:

"For the purpose of open access, the author has applied [a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence] [an ‘Open Government Licence’] (or where permitted by the NIHR) [a Creative Commons Attribution No-derivatives (CC BY-ND) licence] to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising". 

• Include a data sharing statement: this should describe how the data underlying your findings can be accessed by other researchers. Also, the policy states that “Where there are reasons to protect access to the data, for example commercial confidentiality or sensitivities around data derived from potentially identifiable human participants, these should be included in the statement”. 

• If an OA fee has been funded by NIHR, there is a requirement on the publisher to deposit the final version of record in PMC, to be shared with EPMC at the time of publication. Otherwise, researchers should ensure their final accepted manuscript is deposited in Europe PMC 

• Deposit your article to SORA upon acceptance by uploading the Accepted Manuscript to the CRIS within 3 months of the date of acceptance. 

• Check carefully any publishing agreement you are asked to sign, which may conflict with your funder obligations: contact us and your funder for advice before signing, or if you encounter difficulties in using the rights retention statement required by UKRI. 

NIHR have produced this more detailed step by step guide.

NIHR considers CC-BY or Open Government Licence (OGL) appropriate in most cases, but if there are reasons a more restrictive licence is thought needed, you must contact the NIHR in advance. NIHR have made a form available for this purpose. Decisions will be made on a case by case basis.

If you think you may need to ask for a licence exception, let us know so we can help advise you.

You may be able to meet the open access requirement without paying an upfront open access fee under one of our read and publish deals, or by using the rights retention statement and making your accepted MS available immediately (see FAQ 4 above). 

If you are not able to publish without upfront fee under a read and publish deal, there may be options for paying open access fees, depending on your grant.

Previously, it was possible to pay open access fees to publish the main study findings in a peer reviewed open access journal, using money which was budgeted for in the original research funding award. You may have funding remaing in the grant if this is the case.

Under the revised policy, NIHR will pay ‘reasonable’ fees to enable immediate open access (NIHR Open Access publications funding guidance).   The NIHR will be providing an allocation for this purpose.

Please see FAQ 7 below on how to apply for open access fee funding.

Note: NIHR  open access funds cannot be used to pay other research associated or publication costs, such as page and colour charges, open access fees for book chapters, monographs, edited collections, non-peer reviewed materials.

Please contact us before submission if you think publishing open access is going to incur a fee.

Applications must be submitted before a manuscript is submitted to a publisher.

Please complete the St George’s Open Access Fund application form (Word, St George's, University of London login required), then send it to us at openaccess, or let us know if you have any queries.

We can then adivse you if it will be appropriate for the award holder to complete any of the forms on the NIHR Open Access request forms  page.

If after 1^st June 2022 you have already submitted your manuscript and neither it nor the published version will be available on publication under CC-BY, please contact us for further advice.

You will need to acknowledge fully all the funders and grants from which the research reported has arisen, and ensure that your article complies with their open access policies.

Ask us! Get in touch before submission: openaccess@sgul.ac.uk

The NIHR can also be contacted with questions about their OA policy and for related funding guidance: openaccess@nihr.ac.uk