As part of the ongoing Open Access Review, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) will welcome input from across the sector later this year through public consultation.
Open Access aims to make the findings of publicly-funded research freely available online as soon as possible, in ways that will maximise re-use. This is central to UKRI’s ambitions for research and innovation in the UK, as sharing new knowledge has benefits for researchers, the wider higher education sector, businesses, and others.
The UKRI Open Access Review concerns open access to formal scholarly research articles, peer-reviewed conference proceedings and monographs. It is an opportunity to align policies across UKRI’s councils, with the UK Funding Bodies on future Research Excellence Framework (REF) policy, and to consider how Innovate UK should be included. The current Research Councils UK (RCUK) policy continues to apply over the period of the review. There will be no change to the REF 2021 open access policy.
The Open Access Review is being undertaken in four phases of work, which started in Autumn 2018 and will run to Spring 2020.
Throughout the Review UKRI will be engaging with a range of relevant stakeholders, and a public consultation on the draft UKRI policy will now take place later this year to allow further time for input from across the sector on the draft policy. The review is expected to report in March and 2020 and UKRI expects the revised policy to apply during 2020.
The REF is jointly governed by the four UK higher education funding bodies - Research England (part of UKRI); Scottish Funding Council; Higher Education Funding Council for Wales; The Department for the Economy (Northern Ireland). Although the REF Open Access policy is within scope of the UKRI review, the four UK funding bodies will make final decisions on the future policy for REF.
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