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 or book chapters.
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 in Europe PMC on publication and under a CC BY licence. The CRUK open access block grant can be used to pay charges associated with this route where publications must meet the following criteria:
- An peer-reviewed original research article
- Acknowledges CRUK funding in the appropriate format
- Made freely available by the publisher at publication in Europe PubMed Central and on the journal site
- Published with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence (not CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND).
If your publication meets these criteria you can request funds from the CRUK open access grant.
Route 2: Publish in a subscription journal and make the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) freely available in Europe PMC 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 agreed a transformative 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 SHERPA/FACT. Please contact us to discuss any issues that arise from this.