The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has embarked on a policy which makes significant move towards fully embracing open access as preferred means of publishing and distributing scholarly research output emanates from the UK higher learning institutions. The HEFCE calls this policy document “One Great Big Thing for British Universities” and encourages all universities in the country to gear towards warmly embracing open access. The institutions can demonstrate their compliance with the policy by publishing on open access platforms and subsequentlydepositing research papers in open access repositories.

The policy states that, “to be eligible for submission to the post-2014 REF (Research Excellence Frame work, author’s final peer-reviewed manuscripts must have been deposited in an institutional or subject repository on acceptance for publication.” This policy mainly applies to research outputs accepted for publication after 1 April 2016; nonetheless it strongly recommends that institutions start implementing it now.

According to this open access policy, the higher education institutions can make their research output available and accessible to the public either through green or gold routes or through the combination of both approaches. In addition, it encourages the need to deposit metadata of not yet openly accessible papers, perhaps in compliance with horizon 2020 open access policy, while they are still under embargo period. Up on the expiration of the embargo period, however, the new open access policy requires immediate access to those articles through open access platforms. Moreover, HEFCE pledges to work closely with the higher learning institutions to support repositories in order to ensure smooth implementation of the policy.

The UK open access policy, which came as a result of extensive consultation with the higher learning institutions, is touted as a very progressive policy which can be a model for other European higher learning institutions. See HEFCE policy document