Open Access to research outputs - ESRC's policy and your obligations
We are is committed to the principles stated in the Research Councils' 2006 statement on access to research outputs (PDF on external website), and to ensuring our research community makes the outputs from ESRC-funded research readily available.
Our grant holders must offer any data resulting from an award to the UK Data Archive (external website), and make details of grant outcomes and outputs available through the ESRC research catalogue.
ESRC's Open Access Policy
Our Open Access Policy includes information on issues such as metadata, submissions and preservation.
Guidance to ESRC grant holders
Our Open Access Policy includes full details of requirements for grant holders. Some of this information is summarised below.
For all grants awarded as a result of applications submitted from 1 October 2006, it is mandatory, at the earliest opportunity, to:
deposit a copy of any resultant articles published in journals or conference proceedings, in the ESRC research catalogue
wherever possible, deposit the bibliographical metadata relating to such articles, including a link to the publisher's website, at or around the time of publication, in the ESRC research catalogue.
We also encourage, but do not formally oblige, all grant holders to deposit articles arising from grants awarded as a result of applications before 1 October 2006.
The version of the article you should deposit depends on publishers' agreements with their authors. Our guidance is that our funded researchers should deposit the outputs from any research in our research catalogue, where this is permitted by publishers' licensing or copyright arrangements.
Grant holders are also encouraged to submit copies of resultant publications and/or associated metadata with institutional and other appropriate repositories.
Author-pays publishing
With regard to author pays publishing, ESRC's guidance is that authors choose where to place their research and that it is for author's institutions to decide whether they are prepared to use funds from full economic costs (or other income) to pay any page charges or other publishing fees, where the predicted direct costs of dissemination of research outputs will be incurred during the period of the grant. Where these costs are likely to occur after the grant has ended, they should be included in the indirect costs of the research organisation.
Publishers' agreements and embargoes
Full implementation of these requirements requires that current copyright and licensing policies, such as embargo periods or provisions limiting the use of deposited content to non-commercial purposes, are respected by authors. Our guidance is based on the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies.
Under this policy, at no time will individual authors be required to negotiate copyright and licensing arrangements with their publishers.
If possible and/or necessary, the author should amend their copyright agreement with the publisher so that self-archiving is not prohibited. However, this is not required by the ESRC. By using a 'licence to publish' (external website), the author retains certain rights for various scholarly purposes whilst granting the publisher a sole licence for certain copyright related acts which have an economic or commercial objective with respect to the article.
The ESRC will work with publishers to put in place mechanisms for publishers submitting publications on behalf of authors, where this is possible.