The new policy changes the Open Access landscape in the UK

Open access: With their recent announcement, the UK's largest research funders, such as the UK Higher Education Finance Council (Higher Educations Funding Council for England-HEFCE), of Wales and Scotlands adopt a mandatory Open Access policy for all articles that will be funded by the Research Excellence Framework (Research Excellence Framework) from 2016 onwards.

The Research Excellence Framework is the key national research evaluation system used by research funders to selectively fund higher education institutions. What the Framework of Excellence stipulates, universities are obliged to follow it to the letter. The policy links the submission of publications in repositories with the Framework of Excellence, with the evaluation and funding of higher education institutions, that is, this simple requirement is expected to change the culture of scientific publications in British universities.

The new criteria refer to all publications in conference and conference proceedings that have been accepted for publication after 1^η April. They do not concern monographs or data at this stage. The policy stipulates that manuscripts that have been evaluated must be submitted to an institutional or thematic repository at the same time as they are accepted for publication. Metadata describing the publication such as title, author, etc, must be immediately available to anyone from the search engines. Once a publisher has issued a time-stamp, the manuscripts must be available to anyone even for download, as soon as it expires.

The new Framework of Excellence also states that any university applying for funding should demonstrate how it supports open access. The policy was adopted following extensive stakeholder consultation at which 460 responses were submitted.

Alma Swan, director of SPARC, argues that the importance of the new adopted policy lies on the one hand in recognizing the importance and support of repositories in practice and at low cost application of open access and the fact that it embeds open access into the publishing workflow by requiring authors to deposit their publication while they are still actively in the publishing process.