Compliance with funders

All BMJ author agreements allow authors to comply with funder open access requirements as shown on the Jisc Open Policy Finder website. ROARMAP also allows you to search for open access policies by university, research institution and research funder. 

In many cases, funders include open access fees or Article Processing Charges (APC) within the research grant or by block grants to institutions. Upon acceptance, authors will be given the option to pay a fee to make the article open access.

Where an open access fee is paid

A number of funders and institutions mandate a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence for open access articles. In order to comply, authors are asked to select the CC BY licence during the submission process. Please visit the Jisc Open Policy Finder to check your funder’s policy. 

Open access articles will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) unless CC-BY is required.

Where an open access fee is not paid

Articles are published in the usual way and remain behind access controls. BMJ’s exclusive licence to publish complies with the Jisc Open Policy Finder green open access guidelines and allows authors to meet funder requirements by permitting the self-archiving of the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) – but not the final published version – in an institutional repository immediately after the article’s online publication date. BMJ will deposit the AAM of all NIH-funded research to NIHMS upon acceptance with zero embargo to comply with the latest NIH Public Access Policy. The decision to accept an article is not influenced by the author’s ability to pay an APC. 

Please note the above also applies to unfunded research.

See the BMJ policies on author self-archiving and permissions.

NIH Employees

Manuscripts authored or co-authored by one or more NIH employees must be submitted with a completed and signed NIH Publishing Agreement and Manuscript Cover Sheet according to NIH’s Employee Procedures. BMJ will deposit the AAM of all NIH-funded research to NIHMS upon acceptance, with zero embargo, to ensure authors can comply with the latest NIH Public Access Policy.