LSE Open Access Policy

Traditionally, when publishing scholarly articles, staff at LSE have assigned copyright to the publisher via a copyright transfer agreement. As a result, many scholarly articles are under the partial or complete ownership of publishers.

The new Open Access Policy means LSE can apply a Creative Commons licence and make the AAM available from LSE Research Online. Copyright remains with authors unless they transfer copyright to a third party, eg, a publisher.

The policy will primarily make the process of making your publications open access and complying with funder and REF requirements more simple. You will no longer need to check whether a journal is compliant before submitting, and Library staff will no longer need to check licences and embargo rules from publishers.

There are also significant financial benefits to not paying high APCs in journals which have only a gold route to funder compliance, which LSE or the funder might pay. Not only does this direct funding away from research, it is not equitable within and across institutions.

Quite a few! Including Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Imperial. Internationally, Harvard introduced a similar policy in 2008 and since then over 50 US institutions have followed this example, and they have been joined by over 15 European universities and several others in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The policy applies to all LSE staff, as defined in the LSE Intellectual Property Policy, and postgraduate research students.

The policy applies to all peer-reviewed research outputs including journal articles and conference papers in a publication with an ISSN, monographs, book chapters, scholarly editions and edited collections.

LSE will be asserting a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to make manuscripts of the scholarly outputs of staff publicly available. This will not affect the copyright ownership of any outputs, but researchers will be strongly encouraged not to sign copyright transfer agreements which assign their copyright to publishers.

You can opt-out of the policy for that paper if your authors will not agree. You will need to ensure your publication meets the requirements of your funder and/or REF2029 via another route. Your funder may choose to sanction authors who do not comply with their open access policies, for example by not awarding future grants.

You will still retain the copyright any work you’ve created while at LSE - unless you have transferred copyright to a publisher - and LSE will continue to apply a Creative Commons Attribution licence and make the outputs freely available from LSE Research Online.

Get in touch with the Open Access team.

Deposit your accepted manuscripts via our form, on acceptance and not later than the date of first online publication.

The Open Access team will apply a CC BY licence and make the manuscript open access on publication.

Yes, we contacted publishers in advance of the policy coming into effect. The policy and licence will only apply to the accepted manuscript version of your publication, and you retain copyright allowing you to publish as usual. However, authors are strongly encouraged not to sign copyright transfer agreements which assign their copyright to publishers.

Many other institutions have already implemented similar policies for journal articles, and we are not aware of any publications being rejected due to this type of policy.

Yes, all co-authors should agree on the publishing strategy for any output. If your co-authors do not agree to LSE’s open access policy, you can opt out of the policy for that paper.

A Creative Commons Attribution licence, which allows readers of your work to access for free, to copy and share it, to adapt and edit it, including for commercial purposes. The user must always attribute you as the author of the original work.

If authors publish in an open access journal, or one that is included in a Transformative Agreement, and the final published version is published under a CC BY licence, that version and not the accepted manuscript will be made available in LSE Research Online.

Other exceptions may be possible in a small number of circumstances. Please get in touch with the team to discuss.

Third party copyrighted material will not fall under the scope of this policy. An accepted manuscript version of your article can be licenced under a Creative Commons licence and include third party material under a more restrictive licence. But this should be clearly labelled and in some cases you might need to seek permission for this further use of third party material, or remove it from the accepted version.

Yes, for journal articles, the LSE Open Access policy aligns with the REF2029 requirements providing you deposit your publications on acceptance.

Yes, for journal articles, the LSE Open Access policy aligns with the funder requirements for UKRI, ERC, NIHR, and Wellcome.

Where a researcher wishes to opt out of the requirement for immediate open access upon publication, or the application of a CC BY licence, they should fill in this form to request to opt out of the relevant requirement(s) of this policy.

Any such request will be reasonably considered but will not be granted where to do so would put the School (or the relevant researcher) in breach of a funder requirement.

Please note that where you have opted out of the policy for a specific publication, the accepted manuscript must still be deposited in LSE Research Online, where it will be made open access in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy.

The accepted manuscript version. This is the version that has been peer reviewed, revised and copyedited, but has not yet been typeset.

We recommend a CC BY licence, but there is flexibility in the policy for other Creative Commons licences. For example, CC BY-NC (non-commercial) or CC BY-ND (no derivatives).

Third party copyrighted material will not fall under the scope of this policy. An accepted manuscript version of your book or chapter can be licenced under a Creative Commons licence and include third party material under a more restrictive licence. But this should be clearly labelled and in some cases you might need to seek permission for this further use of third party material, or remove it from the accepted version.

No, whilst the policy permits LSE to make the accepted manuscript available immediately, we will only do this at the request of the author and after a discussion with them.