Cancer Research UK Policy
Policy Summary
Cancer Research UK (CRUK) requires all primary research articles that acknowledge a CRUK grant and are published in peer-reviewed journals to be made open access in Europe PubMed Central at the time of publication. The policy does not apply to review papers, editorials, commentaries, book chapters or books.
The following requirements must be met:
- An peer-reviewed original research article
- Acknowledge CRUK funding in the appropriate format, using the grant reference number, e.g. This work was supported by Cancer Research UK [Cref./A ref. OR XXXX\123456]
- Freely available by the time of publication in Europe PubMed Central
- The open access version must be available with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence, or CC BY-ND by exception (not CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND)
- A data availability/access statement must be included.
Routes to compliance
The above requirements can be met through the following routes:
Route 1: Publish in a fully open access or hybrid journal which makes the Version of Record freely available immediately on publication, and in Europe PMC, and under a CC BY licence. Typically the journal deposits the final publication in Europe PMC on the authors' behalf.
The CRUK open access block grant can be used to pay charges associated with this route where publications must meet the above requirement criteria. If your publication meets these criteria you can request funds from the CRUK open access grant.
These funds are limited and CRUK cannot provide additional funds where the block grant funding has been fully utilised.
Route 2: Publish in a subscription journal and make the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) freely available immediately on publication. Typically, the author will need to deposit the AAM in Europe PMC and CRUK grantholders have been issued with a Europe PMC Plus account to allow this. CRUK encourages, though does not require, the AAM to be posted to Europe PMC with a CC BY licence.
Route 3: Publish in a journal that has an agreement with the university. These agreements provide corresponding authors affiliated with Newcastle University with CRUK-compliant open access at no additional cost.
Researchers can check if their chosen journal is compliant with this policy in Open Policy Finder. Please contact us at openaccess@ncl.ac.uk to discuss any issues that arise from this.
Preprints
All CRUK-funded researchers are encouraged to:
- Post preprints of their work en route to peer review.
- Publish them under a CC-BY licence on a platform that is indexed in Europe PMC.
Additional requirements
As per CRUK's grant conditions, researchers must:
- Provide the CRUK Press Team with a copy of all publications and conference abstracts arising from the Grant Activities at the time of submission for publication via the online manuscript submission form on CRUK's website or email press.office@cancer.org.uk. Any manuscripts and details will be held in the strictest confidence.