We are pleased to announce that, for the first time, we are guaranteeing a route to full compliance with UKRI’s new open access policy for the vast majority of researchers in the UK.

All UKRI-funded research submitted to journals from 1 April onwards must be published as open access without embargo. Most researchers in the UK who publish in our journals are able to publish as open access under a transformative agreement (TA, sometimes called a Read and Publish agreement) between their institution and Cambridge University Press. Nearly all of those transformative agreements are uncapped, meaning that any number of articles can be made open access without any increased cost to the institution or their authors. But even these uncapped TAs have, until now, not covered all authors, in all circumstances, at those institutions.

We are now plugging the gaps in two ways:

Firstly, articles published in subscription journals can be deposited in institutional repositories without embargo and under a CC-BY license (or other CC license if their funder allows this). The only limitations are that the institute must subscribe to the journal as part of their uncapped TA, and that the accepted manuscript, not the final published article, is deposited in the institutional repository (Green OA).

Secondly, researchers who are co-authors on non-OA articles published in hybrid journals are also able to deposit their accepted manuscripts in their institutional repository. Our transformative agreements, in line with URKI requirements, only allow corresponding authors to make articles Gold OA in hybrid journals. However, co-authors must still comply with URKI’s OA policy. Provided a journal is included in their institution’s uncapped TA, co-authors can deposit their accepted manuscripts in their institutional repository. Corresponding authors will continue to publish as Gold OA, as before.

Our goal for full open access is shared by UKRI and research institutions in the UK. This has enabled us to reach the point where we have uncapped TAs in place with most UK institutions. As a result we can now offer the majority of our UK authors ‘Green-by-exception’ to fill the gaps in their routes to compliance without undermining the transition to sustainable open access (Gold OA).

We have always acknowledged that while Green OA has a role in the transformation to open access, Green OA itself cannot be a sustainable route to full open access. In particular, we have said that our journals do not support Plan S’s Rights Retention Strategy as way of circumventing our journal policies. Our position on this has not changed. It is the development of Gold OA through uncapped TAs in the UK that allows us to support Green-by-exception.

We hope that in time we will be able to extend Green-by-exception to other institutions outside the UK, as part of our final steps to full open access.

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