When publishing their research, authors have a duty to meet funders’ Open Access policies. To ensure your published article will comply with your funder’s policy, please check the guidance available here. To understand what is required of them, authors should also carefully check grant award conditions and information on funders’ webpages, before they submit a paper to a particular journal.
In some cases, authors may only comply with funders’ Open Access policies by arranging immediate ‘Gold’ Open Access publication through the publisher of their chosen journal. This incurs a cost called an Article Processing Charge (APC) that must be paid for the article to be made Open Access in perpetuity.
King’s receives limited block grants from certain funders to facilitate the payment of APCs. This funding is managed by the Research Support team within Libraries & Collections.
If you are acknowledging funding from British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, UKRI, or the Wellcome Trust: you can apply for block grant funding to cover APC costs by completing our funding request form.
Please complete this form at the point your article is submitted to the journal. The demand for funds outstrips the amount received by King’s and requesting funding does not guarantee we will be able to cover an APC. Getting in touch when your article is submitted makes it more likely that you may be able to access funds.
If funding is not available, the Research Support team will support you to ensure compliance with funder Open Access policies through other means.
This may include ‘Green’ Open Access, whereby the Accepted Author Manuscript of a paper is archived in our institutional repository Pure, and made available to the public (sometimes after an embargo period has elapsed). Articles not acknowledging relevant funding can also be made Open Access at no cost via the Green route.
Unfunded articles may also be eligible for inclusion in one of the transformative agreements that King’s has signed with certain publishers. To check whether an article may be eligible for a publisher agreement, check our guidance page.