The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) has made recent revisions to its Open Access policy for peer reviewed research articles, including review articles not commissioned by a publisher, and conference papers, where the work has benefited from NIHR funding.
For any in-scope output submitted for publication since 1st June 2022, the revised NIHR Open Access policy terms will come into effect.
For articles submitted prior to 1st June 2022, the NIHR’s former Open Access policy will apply. Further details on both the pre-1st June and post-1st June Open Access policies are available from our LibGuide.
Whilst NIHR are not members of cOAlition S, the group of research funders behind the Plan S Open Access initiative, NIHR’s updated Open Access has been influenced by a number of the core principles in Plan S.
These include the requirement that Open Access to in-scope outputs be provided immediately at point of publication, doing away with embargo periods which result in a delay between a work being published and an open access version being made available. Authors can comply with the policy by ensuring that either the final published article or author accepted manuscript version of the article is made available through PubMed Central and Europe PubMed at the point of publication.
In terms of licensing requirements, the revised NIHR policy calls for a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence or Open Government Licence (OGL) to apply as default. In common with the current UKRI and Wellcome Trust policies, NIHR does permit case-by-case applications for a more restrictive Creative Commons No-Derivatives licence (CC BY ND) to apply. Applications need to be made in advance using the online form provided by NIHR.
Furthermore, when assessing applications for funding, NIHR have also established a ‘Responsible Use of Metrics’ policy, meaning that ‘short-hand proxies for research quality or impact’ such as journal impact factors and H-indexes will not be relied on for the purpose of research evaluation. This reflects point 10 of the list of Plan S principles.
Where a Coventry University author is acting as corresponding author on the paper, they can benefit from the range of publisher Read & Publish agreements which we are signed up to. Publishing in a journal covered by one of these agreements under the terms of a CC BY licence will help ensure compliance with the NIHR policy terms.
NIHR are also willing to cover Open Access Article Processing Charge (APC) costs where authors are publishing in journals not covered by one of our Read & Publish agreements, and where compliance is being achieved through the ‘Gold’ Open Access route with the final published version being made available Open Access. For more information as to how such funding can be accessed and the methodology employed by NIHR to allocate Open Access funds, please see their information online.
For any authors whom this policy impacts and who have any questions in relation to the revised policy, we would welcome you getting in contact with us at: oa.lib@coventry.ac.uk.
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