Funder Open Access policies

Wellcome Trust

King’s receives an annual award to cover the Open Access costs of Wellcome-funded research articles. To apply for Wellcome funding please use our funding request form.

From 1st January 2025, Wellcome has updated their Open Access policy for peer-reviewed, original research articles supported wholly, or in part, by Wellcome. The funder will only fund the cost of article processing charges for research articles published in fully open access journals or platforms indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Further details on the Open Access policy are available on Wellcome’s webpages.

Three different routes are available for Wellcome-funded outputs to comply with Wellcome’s Open Access policy. Further guidance on each route is available on Wellcome’s compliance guide.

1. Publish in a fully Open Access journal or platform. Where costs are fair and reasonable, Wellcome will pay Article Processing Charges for fully Open Access journals. For this option, please use our funding request form to apply for Open Access funding at the point of submission.
2. Publish in a subscription (or hybrid) journal, and make your Accepted Author Manuscript (AAM) immediately freely available on Europe PMC. Contact openaccess@kcl.ac.uk for any assistance in uploading Accepted Author Manuscripts to Europe PMC.
3. Publish with a journal that is part of a transformative agreement that King’s is participating in, so that the article can be published as Gold open access under the agreement. Details of the publisher agreements that are available to King’s authors can be found on our webpages. 

Use the Journal Checker Tool to check your compliance options when submitting to specific journals.

When publishing in a subscription journal and making the final accepted manuscript open access on Europe PMC, authors can use either King's Rights Retention Strategy or the funder's, in which case they should include the following statement with their submission: 

"This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission."

This route to compliance doesn't require payment of an APC. 

Articles acknowledging funding from Wellcome must also include a data availability statement to help readers locate the original research data (even if there is no data underpinning the research). For guidance on writing a statement, see our page about sharing research data, on the 'Citation' tab. 

Original monographs and book chapters authored or co-authored by Wellcome Trust funded authors must be made freely available via NCBI Bookshelf PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC within six months from publication. Authors can deposit to NCBI Bookshelf and Europe PMC using the funder’s deposit form. Wellcome will pay Gold open access fees (also known as Book Processing Charges) for compliant publications; where the funder pays the open access charges the output needs to be published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY licence is preferred but not required). To read more about the policy, and to apply for funding, see Wellcome Trust webpages. 

British Heart Foundation (BHF)

We receive a very modest block grant from British Heart Foundation to cover Open Access costs for a limited number of articles. Requests for funding should be still be made using the funding request form. When you are submitting your paper please contact openaccess@kcl.ac.uk to find out whether funds are available.

BHF's policy can be found as follows:

British Heart Foundation Open Access Policy:

Cancer Research UK (CRUK)

We receive a very modest block grant from Cancer Research UK to cover Open Access costs for a limited number of articles. Requests for funding should be still be made using the funding request form. When you are submitting your paper please contact openaccess@kcl.ac.uk to find out whether funds are available.

CRUK's policy can be found as follows:

Cancer Research UK Open Access Policy:

National Institute of Health Research (NIHR):

NIHR’s Open Access policy only applies to authors fully funded by NIHR. It requires that one main, final publication from each grant be made Open Access immediately on publication on the publisher’s website. All other publications resulting from the NIHR funding should be uploaded to a subject or institutional repository within 6 months of publication.

For the main publication: funds to cover APCs should be included in the initial grant application. If they were not:

• NIHR grant programme funded researchers should contact their programme manager to request funds.
• Researchers who work in a BRC or other part of the NIHR Infrastructure should contact their BRC manager to request funds.

(For publications submitted before 1 June 2022, please refer to the former NIHR Open Access policy.)

The European Research Council (ERC):

The ERC strongly encourages ERC funded researchers to use discipline specific repositories for their publications. The recommended repository for Life Sciences is Europe PubMed Central; and for Physical Sciences and Engineering arXiv is recommended. The ERC Scientific Council is currently not recommending any specific repository for Social Sciences and Humanities. However, it is reviewing existing practices and open access infrastructures in this domain and may make recommendations in the future. If there is no appropriate discipline specific repository, researchers should make their publications available in institutional repositories or in centralized ones, such as Zenodo.

For full details of the policy please see this ERC document.

Horizon2020:

The policy for the European Union's current Research and Innovation funding programme Horizon 2020 regards making work Open Access as a two-step process.

1. Deposit an electronic copy of either the published version or the final accepted version (after peer-review) into a repository (such as Pure).

2. Ensure that the output is Open Access within a maximum of six months (twelve months for publications in the Social Sciences and Humanities)

For full details of the policy please see this document.

Versus Arthritis, Blood Cancer UK and Parkinsons UK (previously part of Charities Open Access Fund 'COAF'):

COAF (a consortium of UK health charities formed to pay for immediate open access for eligible papers) was disbanded in October 2020.

At the time it was discontinued, the constituent members were: British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Parkinsons UK, Versus Arthritis, Wellcome Trust.

Post-COAF we will administer individual block grants for British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Wellcome Trust. For details of the process for these funders, please see the other tabs on this page.

Versus Arthritis wish you to apply for open access funding via Grant Tracker. See their policy pages below for more details. Although we don’t have funds to pay open access charges for Versus Arthritis we are keen to offer advice and guidance about how best to achieve compliance with their open access policy. Please contact openaccess@kcl.ac.uk if you have any questions.

Similarly, it appears that Blood Cancer UK will not be providing us with a block grant to administer; see their policy below for details. Please contact openaccess@kcl.ac.uk if you have any questions.

Finally, Parkinsons UK will be encouraging the researchers they fund to include open access publishing costs in future grant applications. See their policy below or contact openaccess@kcl.ac.uk if you have any questions.

Versus Arthritis Open Access Policy:

Blood Cancer UK Open Access Policy:

Parkinsons UK Open Access Policy:

The following funders also require open access in some form from their fundees: 

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Leverhulme Trust
MNDA (Motor Neurone Disease Association)
World Health Organisation

If you want to learn more about other funder policies,  Open Policy Finder may be useful. If your funder's policy is not included, or if you have any further queries, please email openaccess@kcl.ac.uk