National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) open access policy

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) open access policy applies to:

• NIHR Programmes, NIHR Personal Awards and NIHR Global Health Research Portfolio: research studies where the research costs are funded in whole or in part by the NIHR. Personal awards that do not fund research are out of scope of this policy.
• For NIHR Infrastructure (including NIHR research units and schools): research studies where the majority of the research costs are funded by the NIHR.

This includes:

• Research articles
• Reviews not commissioned by publishers
• Conference papers

Monographs (with the exception of NIHR Journals Library publications), book chapters, edited collections, or forms of non-peer-reviewed material, such as pre-prints, are considered out of scope of this policy.

How do I comply?

To comply with NIHR's policy, authors should:

• deposit the publication's final Version of Record or Accepted Manuscript in Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) or PubMed Central (PMC) by the official publication date
• ensure the deposited publication is openly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY), or Open Government licence (OGL) when subject to Crown Copyright
• include a data sharing statement describing how the underpinning research data can be accessed.
• acknowledge NIHR funding and include the unique award identifier and disclaimer in the funding or acknowledgments section of the manuscript

NIHR may approve requests for a more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution No-derivatives licence (CC BY-ND) on a case-by-case basis. Authors can request a CC BY-ND licence using the NIHR Open Access request form.

Publishing open access in a journal or Open Research platform

Authors are recommended to publish in a journal fully covered by one of our existing publisher agreements. 

Use our search tool to check if a particular journal is covered.

If your chosen fee-based fully open access journal is not covered by an agreement, a ring-fenced open access envelope should be included in the NIHR grant to pay the article processing charge (APC).

Requests for additional Open Access funding can be made using an NIHR Open Access request form.

Authors should read the Open Access funding guidance for information on the terms and processes for accessing Open Access funding.

More information

Further guidance on the policy and achieving compliance is available on the NIHR site. Any queries regarding the NIHR Open Access policy should be directed to openaccess@nihr.ac.uk.