UK’s Research Councils publish new stronger policy on Open Access « SPARC Europe

“Today the UK’s Research Councils (RCUK) have published their new, joint, strengthened policy on Open Access. This is based on 5 years’ experience of the previous policy which has been only partially effective in delivering an Open Access corpus of literature resulting from RCUK funding. The new policy defines Open Access material as that made available under Creative Commons CC-BY-type licensing. It stipulates a maximum embargo period of 6 months for self-archived articles (‘Green’ Open Access) and provides a means for APCs to be paid for ‘Gold’ Open Access. RCUK will also monitor compliance more stringently than previously. SPARC Europe warmly welcomes this new policy and looks forward to seeing much more UK research made openly available for reading and re-use as a result.”