Document control
- Version: 1.0
- Responsible: Sarah Dodd
- Approver: Associate Director, Research
- Approved Date: October 2026
Open Access Position Statement
The Academy’s purpose is to advance and promote excellence in engineering for the benefit of society. Hence, the Academy requires unrestricted online access to the publication of the research that it funds.
We are aware that the impact of AI-generated material on systems of scholarly communication is significant. In that context, we will regularly review our approach to ensuring that work is able to attract the attention required for maximum benefit to society.
Encouraging and fostering collaborations between industry and academia are key components of the Academy’s activities, and the Academy does not believe that this is incompatible with open access. We do however refer Awardees to the condition in our terms which allows for the redaction of research findings from publication if that may prejudice anticipated commercial exploitation by the Host Organisation and Recipient. For the avoidance of doubt, all recipients of funding aimed at supporting entrepreneurship are considered as falling into this category.
For applicants
Applicants can choose to apply for costs associated with open access directly from the Academy as part of their application up to the limit of non-salary costs or total costs within the particular programme, so long as the costs are clearly identifiable and applicants can demonstrate that no other institutional funding is available to cover them.
For Awardees
(For the avoidance of doubt our interpretation of UKRIs open access policy is that it is limited to research outputs as defined in section 2 of the policy. As such this does not apply to Academy grants where research is neither being funded or would be reasonably expected as an output for example Awardees of our public engagement programme).
Grant Recipients must ensure that where they are required to publish the results of their Grant Activities they ensure that publication is via a journal or publishing platform which meets the requirements of the UKRI Open Access Policy.
Grant Recipients may use all flexible funds (i.e. those not ringfenced or reserved for staff, equipment or similar) within their existing grants to cover open access costs, so long as costs are clearly identifiable and they have validated that no other institutional funding is available to cover them.
All Grant Recipients must be familiar with the publications and open access policies of their Host Organisation and ensure that, as well as complying with the Academy’s Open Access Position statement, they comply with those, whilst seeking appropriate venues of publication to promote the beneficial social and economic impact of their work.
The Academy is generally unable to offer additional funding to cover open access costs. However, Grant Recipients should contact their grant contact in such cases where their Award offers no flexible funding pot that can be used to support Open Access and their institution has no funding available for such costs. Exceptionally, where there have been underspends against other grants budgets, we may be able to repurpose that funding to help increase impact through additional support for open access publication.
Published 26 October 2026
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