REF2029: New year, new OA requirements
Maybe you celebrated the new year with champagne and fireworks, but we in the open access team celebrated with something far more exciting: the implementation of new open access requirements for REF2029!
If you’ve been following developments, you’ll have already heard of the OA requirements for REF2029, which were first announced in December 2024 (supplementing the existing requirements we followed since 2021). These new OA requirements did not take effect until now though, with all research outputs published from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2028 needing to follow the updated requirements.
Below, you can find more details about the updated REF2029 requirements, but ultimately, our guidance remains largely unchanged:
Deposit your accepted manuscript in Pure upon acceptance.
REF2029 open access requirements
Many of the requirements are similar to those active in REF2021, which also applied to outputs published from 1 Jan 2021 to 31 Dec 2025, though there are also several key differences. We’ll try to give an overview to key elements though below, but it may be helpful to do a deep dive on the actual policy itself.
The details:
- In-scope outputs are still all journal articles—peer reviewed or not—and conference contributions with an ISSN.
- Outputs must be made open access by making the accepted manuscript available in a repository such as Pure (also known as the green route), or directly through the publisher (also known as the gold or diamond route).
- Where possible, outputs should have reuse licensing applied that allows free access and sharing. This includes but is not limited to CC BY - which itself is already required by our institutional open access policy and enabled by our rights retention strategy for in-scope articles – and other Creative Commons licenses.
- Embargo periods are allowable, but limited to:
- Up to 6 months for main panels A and B
- Up to 12 months for main panels C and D
- Deposit can be completed after publication, though we still recommend uploading accepted manuscripts on acceptance to ensure this step is completed.
Take a look at the full policy, but do remember: if you deposit your accepted manuscript in Pure upon acceptance, making sure to include the date of acceptance in the record, then your output should be compliant.
As always, if you have any questions about these open access requirements, please email us at [email protected].
If you have broader questions about REF, then please contact Research and Innovation Services at [email protected].