Compliance with funders
All BMJ author agreements allow authors to comply with funder open access requirements as shown on the Sherpa Services 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 Sherpa Juliet 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 will be published in the usual way and remain behind access controls. The BMJ exclusive licence to publish complies with the Sherpa Romeo green open access policy and permits authors to comply with funders’ requirements, by allowing the final accepted manuscript (but not the final published version) to be self-archived in their institutional repository immediately after the online publication date. The final accepted manuscript (but not the final published version) can also be placed in PubMed Central (including for deposit by PMC on its international mirror sites) after an embargo period of 12 months from the print publication date or, if not published in print, from being published online, unless otherwise stated by the Funding Body. 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.