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Research Publications and Copyright Policy: REF2029 and Funder Policies

A guide intended to raise awareness, provide a straightforward explanation of what rights retention is and guide researchers through what they need to do to take advantage of the new policy.

How can I use Rights Retention to comply with the REF2029 Open Access Policy

The updated open access policy for REF 2029 starts on 1 January 2026 and applies to journal articles and papers in conference proceedings with an ISSN. 

How does the Research Publications and Copyright Policy enable compliance with the REF2029 Open Access requirements?

For journal articles and papers in conference proceedings first published from 1 January 2026, Main Panels A  and B, permit a maximum embargo period of 6 months, and Main Panels C and D permit a maximum embargo of 12 months.

Many publishers’ standard terms and conditions permit longer embargo periods than those required for the new REF2029 Open Access Policy so won’t meet the requirements. Our Research Publications and Copyright Policy enables our researchers to bypass embargo restrictions imposed by publishers and provides a straightforward route to comply with the REF Open Access policy by making their Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) available on Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) without an embargo and with a Creative Commons licence. 

What do I need to do to ensure compliance?

When your journal article or conference paper is accepted for publication, you need to create a record for the publication on GRO with a copy of your AAM uploaded. When creating a record, please enter the date that your paper was accepted for publication in the ‘dates’ field.

Once you have deposited your article to GRO it will be made openly available upon publication in accordance with our Research Publications and Copyright Policy which will ensure it meets the open access requirements for REF2029.

When do I need to create a record?

To ensure that there are no issues with submitting your publication to REF2029, we recommend creating a record as soon as you can after receiving notification of acceptance and no later than three months after the paper was first published online.

Is the process different if my paper is published Gold Open Access?

Papers published as Gold Open Access, will automatically comply with the REF2029 open access policy. This can be achieved by:

  • publishing in a title covered by one of our ‘read and publish’ agreements,
  • publishing in a fully open access journal that doesn’t require the payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC),
  • or funded authors making an APC payment using the UKRI Open Access Block Grant.

A GRO record with the pdf of the final published version of the paper will still need to be created for Goldsmiths to be able to submit the publication to REF2029.

How can I comply with funder requirements on Rights Retention?

For funded research, Goldsmiths expects researchers to follow their funder’s requirements on Open Access. The UKRI research councils and Wellcome Trust have requirements for authors around retaining their rights when publishing journal articles and papers in conference proceedings.

UKRI and Wellcome Trust provide guidance on notifying publishers about complying with their open access policies. Both funders expect researchers to include a statement about Rights Retention:  

  • when they are publishing in a subscription-only journal (i.e. where the content is made available only to subscribers) and that journal would otherwise require an embargo period before permitting Open Access to the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM).
  • when they are publishing in a hybrid journal not covered by one of our Read and Publish agreements, and that journal would otherwise require an embargo period before permitting open access. A hybrid journal is one where subscriptions are still required for access to most of the content, but offer an option to make individual articles available as open access after payment of an additional fee by authors, their institutions or research funders.

Authors should use the following text in the acknowledgements section of their manuscript and the publisher cover letter: 

"This research was funded in whole, or in part, by Research Council (Grant number XX/xxxxxxx/X) and/or the Wellcome Trust [Grant number xxxxx]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission."

Further information on complying with the UKRI Open Access policy is available here.