Our policy on open access

We’re dedicated to improving the lives of patients with all types of blood cancer, including leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma. Our life-saving work is focused on finding causes, improving diagnosis and treatments, and running groundbreaking clinical trials for all blood cancer patients.

We want to get the most patient benefit out of the investments we make in research. We believe that free access to and unrestricted re-use of published research is the best way to share and build upon new knowledge and ideas. It'll allow our researchers to build communities and share understanding so we can drive smarter, faster diagnosis and inspire new treatments and better care.

We:

• Require electronic copies of any original research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal, and that acknowledge our funding in whole or in part, to be made available through Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) as soon as possible and, in any event, within six months of the journal publisher's official date of final publication*.
• Expect researchers we fund to select publishing routes that ensure the work is available immediately on publication in its final published form, wherever such options exist for their journal of choice and are compliant with our policy**.
• Encourage – and where an open access article processing charge is paid to the publisher, require – authors and publishers to licence research papers using the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY) so they may be freely copied and reused (for example, for text- and data-mining purposes or for creating a translation), providing that appropriate credit is given to the original authors.
• Encourage researchers we fund to maximise the opportunities to make all their results accessible and available for free. This includes taking advantage of online open publishing platforms and repositories, and ensuring dissemination of negative or confirmatory results.
• We maintain that it's the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author's work is published, that should be considered when making funding decisions.

*We became a member of  Europe PMC in May 2015. Europe PMC is an open science platform that enables access to a worldwide collection of life science publications and preprints from trusted sources. The Europe PMC plus manuscript submission system enables authors to self-archive manuscripts resulting from research funded by Blood Cancer UK.

** Researchers can find out which publishers support open access and are compliant with our current policy by referring to the SHERPA/FACT database.

In October 2014, Blood Cancer UK joined a consortium of UK health research charities to form the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), to provide funding to pay for immediate open access for eligible publications. The COAF partnership ended on 30 September 2020, with implementation of Wellcome's new Plan-S-aligned open access policy.

Blood Cancer UK will facilitate Open Access publishing by making funds available to pay for article processing costs (APCs). This will be in the form of a separate budget, with funds for APCs awarded at Blood Cancer UK’s discretion. From December 2022, publication costs must not be charged to individual grants unless previously agreed by Blood Cancer UK.

The maximum contribution we will make towards a single APC is £2,000. If we agree to pay an APC, the paper must become OA immediately upon online publication and made available through EuropePMC or PubMed Central by the publisher.

Written requests for support can be submitted to research@bloodcancer.org.uk when a manuscript has been accepted for publication and will be reviewed against the following criteria:

- A Blood Cancer UK grantholder or a researcher employed on the grant must be an author on the manuscript. Former grantholders can also apply within two years of the end date of their Blood Cancer UK grant.

- The article must acknowledge Blood Cancer UK as a funder.

- The Blood Cancer UK grant reference number(s) must be accurately cited on the manuscript.

- The proposed journal must support ‘Gold’ OA publishing with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY licence)

- At the time of submitting a request, we expect the grantholder(s) and host institution to have explored alternative sources of OA support available.

- For publications arising from co-funded awards, our expectation is that funder(s) contribute equitably to support OA costs.