Open access and APC funding

King’s members of staff and research students in receipt of relevant funding from UKRI, Wellcome, BHF or CRUK can apply for block grant funding to cover open access costs by completing our funding request form. It is recommended that prior to submitting the form, you create a record on Pure and upload the author’s accepted manuscript of your paper in the repository. If you are unsure how to do this, please see our guide to depositing on Pure. The Author Accepted Manuscript must be uploaded to Pure within 90 days of the acceptance date to be eligible for the next REF.

To be eligible for access to funder’s block grants, the funding must be a grant or award that is held at King’s and that has directly supported the research presented in the article. Outputs solely acknowledging funding sources that provided data, or infrastructure (lab space etc.), are not eligible for block grant funding as they do not have to meet funder open access mandates. Articles and journals will also need to meet funders’ eligibility criteria – the Open Research team will be able to advise on these.

Where outputs are produced in collaboration with authors outside of King’s College London, including King’s Health Partners, it is usually the home institution of the corresponding author who should meet the cost of an APC.

King’s members of staff who do not receive relevant funding can benefit from Read & Publish agreements, and publish their articles Gold open access without any additional charges. List of participating publishers and eligibility criteria are available on our guidance page.

It’s best practice to submit your funding request form at acceptance, and before you commit to payment. When publishing in a fully open access journal, you can also contact the Open Research team at submission to confirm the eligibility criteria for open access funding, but please note that we cannot earmark funds when approving an application; our block grants are spent on a first come, first served basis.

When you make a request for funding to cover your APC fee through the funding request form, the Libraries & Collections Open Research team is notified. The team will consider your request against the eligibility criteria and will check the open access options offered by your chosen journal. They will aim to get back to you within 2 working days to advise on available options.

King's participates in Read & Publish agreements, to help reduce the cost of APCs (Article Processing Charges – the widely accepted term for open access fees) and to increase access to open access publishing. For the majority of these agreements, King’s corresponding authors can publish Gold open access without additional charges, regardless of the funding acknowledged in the paper. Further information on eligibility criteria for each agreement is available on this page.

We currently have 25 transformative agreements. We also have agreements with publishers where additional eligibility criteria apply – these are flagged with an asterisk*