TYPES OF OPEN ACCESS
GOLD open access usually involves the one-off payment of an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher, allowing immediate open access to the publication. With GREEN open access, the publication becomes freely available via an open access repository (e.g. Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC)) after the publisher’s embargo period (usually 6-24 months).
FUNDERS' POLICIES
MRC-funded authors must comply with MRC policy. MRC strongly prefers compliant GOLD open access; although GREEN can be chosen if compliant with MRC policy. For COAF-funded papers, compliant GOLD should be chosen where available. COAF is a group of seven medical research charities that have formed the Charity Open Access Fund (Arthritis Research UK, Bloodwise, Breast Cancer Now, the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Parkinson's UK, and the Wellcome Trust).
A publisher’s GOLD option is compliant if the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence is available and the publisher makes the article available in Europe PMC on behalf of the author; the GREEN option is compliant if it allows the manuscript to be made available in Europe PMC within six months of publication. Some publishers will deposit on behalf of authors, if the author makes it clear they are MRC-funded or COAF-funded. Additionally, a copy of the manuscript must also be deposited in UCL Discovery within 3 months of acceptance to comply with Research Excellence Framework (REF) requirements. Further information on open access and funders' policies is available on the CTU intranet.
UCL OPEN ACCESS TEAM
To comply with both funders’ and REF requirements, MRC CTU aim to make all our publications open access. UCL fund and do much of the administrative work to make your publication open access, and this is done via the UCL Open Access team (open-access@ucl.ac.uk). If you are unsure about the funder’s policy requirements, contact the UCL Open Access Team for advice prior to submission and they wuill be able to provide more detailed advice on funders' and publishers' open access policies.
UCL DISCOVERY
UCL Discovery is UCL's open access repository. For articles published under GREEN open access, authors should deposit a copy of the final manuscript in the UCL Discovery repository within three months of acceptance for publication by the journal in order to comply with REF open access policy. Articles published under GOLD open access are automatically deposited