Cancer Research UK Policy
From 1 October 2026, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) will no longer provide the university with a block grant to support the costs of open access. See the CRUK news post for further information.
If you are CRUK funded and are planning to submit to a fully open access journal, please contact openaccess@ncl.ac.uk to discuss your options.
Policy Summary
Cancer Research UK (CRUK)'s policy on open access requires all primary research articles that acknowledge a CRUK grant and are published in peer-reviewed journals to be made open access in Europe PubMed Central. This should either be at the time of publication, or no later than six months after publication if an embargo is applied.
The policy does not apply to reviews, editorials, conference proceedings, book chapters or books.
The following requirements must be met:
- A peer-reviewed original research article
- Acknowledge CRUK funding in the appropriate format, using the grant reference number, e.g. This work was supported by Cancer Research UK [Cref./A ref. OR XXXX\123456], and for trial results, the CRUK trail number
- Freely available by the time of publication in Europe PubMed Central, or no later than six months after publication if an embargo is applied (an embargo longer than six months is not compliant)
- The open access version must be available with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence, or CC BY-ND by exception (not CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND)
- If the research has used patient data, use the patient data citation
- A data availability/access statement must be included
Routes to compliance
The above requirements can be met through the following routes:
Route 1:
Publish in a fully open access or hybrid journal which makes the Version of Record freely available immediately on publication, and in Europe PMC, and under a CC BY licence. Typically the journal deposits the final publication in Europe PMC on the authors' behalf.
The CRUK open access block grant can be used until 31 September 2026 to pay charges associated with this route where publications must meet the above requirement criteria. If your publication meets these criteria you can request funds from the CRUK open access grant.
These funds are limited and CRUK cannot provide additional funds where the block grant funding has been fully utilised. No additional funds will be provided by CRUK after 1 October 2026.
Route 2:
Publish in a subscription journal and make the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) freely available immediately on publication, see the Reserach Publications & Copyright Policy, or within six months of publication. Typically, the author will need to deposit the AAM in Europe PMC and CRUK grantholders have been issued with a Europe PMC Plus account to allow this.
Route 3:
Publish in a journal that has an agreement with the university. These agreements provide corresponding authors affiliated with Newcastle University with CRUK-compliant open access at no additional cost.
Researchers can check if their chosen journal is compliant with this policy in Open Policy Finder. Please contact us at openaccess@ncl.ac.uk to discuss any issues that arise from this.
Preprints
All CRUK-funded researchers are encouraged to:
- Post preprints of their work en route to peer review.
- Publish them under a CC-BY licence on a platform that is indexed in Europe PMC.
Additional requirements
As per CRUK's grant conditions, researchers must:
- Provide the CRUK Press Team with a copy of all publications and conference abstracts arising from the Grant Activities at the time of submission for publication via the online manuscript submission form on CRUK's website or email press.office@cancer.org.uk. Any manuscripts and details will be held in the strictest confidence.