BU Research Blog

Many funders require the research they fund to be made freely available, free of charge to any readers upon completion of the project. A full list of funders with open access requirements can be found on the Sherpa Juliet website, and includes:

• all UK Research Councils
• European Commission
• Wellcome Trust
• National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)

These requirements have been put in place by funders to maximise the public dissemination of research findings. Despite these open access mandates some funders are reporting that researchers/universities are not compliant; recent research undertaken by the Wellcome Trust indicates a compliance rate of less than 50%.

When preparing a research proposal consider open access publishing as part of your dissemination plan. Some funders will allow you to include open access publication costs within the grant providing that the costs are included at the time of submission and are incurred prior to the end of the grant. Check the funding call guidelines for further information and discuss your open access plans with the CRE Operations team when preparing the costing for your proposal.

We are making a change to BU’s Research and Enterprise Database (RED) this week so that open access obligations are recorded against individual awards. At regular intervals we will run a report showing which projects with open access requirements are due to finish in the next six months, and the SAS Subject Librarians will meet with the relevant Principal Investigators to discuss open access publishing options, promote the new BU Open Access Publication Fund, and to try to ensure that open access requirements are met. Hopefully this will help to increase BU’s compliance with funders’ open access requirements as well as increasing the visibility and impact of BU’s research 🙂

A list of funder’s requiring open access is maintained by the SHERPA team at the University of Nottingham and can be found on the excellent Sherpa Juliet website: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/