Open Access Funding

Open Access Block Grants

We manage open access block grants from UKRI, Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation. These grants can be used to pay open access charges for eligible publications that acknowledge support from these funders. If you believe your publication is eligible for funds from one of these grants please submit an application below.

Apply for Open Access Block Grant Funds

Costing open access in grant applications

Other funders allow open access costs to be included in grant applications. This includes the NIHR, European Commission, Blood Cancer UK and Parkinson’s UK. Where this applies the university statement on open access recommends projects include £6,000 as a directly incurred cost at application. To help with estimating costs for applications, a study of open access charges paid by UK universities in 2016 reported the average fee for an article was £1,905, with a median value of £1,800. Based on our own analysis the average fee we paid in 2021 was approximately £2000.

University funds for open access

The university does not have dedicated funds for open access other than the block grants listed above. However, where no other funds are available to authors and under exceptional circumstances, open access charges may be paid by an author's academic unit or faculty. If you are not sure who to contact in your unit to discuss this, please contact the open access team. If no funds are available, you could request a waiver of the fees from the publisher. 

Non-funded research (PILOT)

The Library was awarded a small QR grant to pay the open access publishing costs of non-funded research in fully open access (OA) journals. This grant has been fully committed for 2023/24 and there are no further funds available at this time. If you have any comments or questions about this Pilot project, please contact open.access@ncl.ac.uk.

Open Access without costs

Your paper may be eligible for open access without additional cost through one of the transformative agreements we have with publishers. Please be aware that the eligibility criteria for these agreements vary and that the agreements the university participates in is subject to change. 

If publishing in a subscription or hybrid journal you can still provide open access without additional costs via the green route. All you need do is upload the accepted manuscript to MyImpact and we will make this open access in ePrints in accordance with publisher terms. In most cases this will meet the open access requirements for REF and of many research funders.

Deposit in ePrints via MyImpact