UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) released their latest Open Access Policy in March 2022. All quotes below are taken from the policy itself.
The policy sets out several routes for making in-scope research openly available: either in a “journal or publishing platform which makes the Version of Record immediately open access via its website” or by “deposit[ing] the Author’s Accepted Manuscript in an institutional or subject repository at the time of final publication.”
The policy also states that ‘in-scope research articles…include a Data Access Statement.”
This applies to “in-scope research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022 and in-scope monographs, book chapters and edited collections published on or after 1 January 2024.”
Outlined below is how Figshare’s institutional repository functionality and capabilities meet the UKRI’s requirements for institutional and subject repositories.
| UKRI requirement | Figshare compliance |
|---|---|
| PIDs for research outputs must be implemented according to international recognised standards, examples of international standards include DOI, URN or Handle | Our clients use Figshare infrastructure for managing and disseminating various types of content including papers, datasets, and theses. As such, best practice would dictate that different PIDs are used for different types of content. Figshare for Institutions is agnostic as to the type and number of PIDs associated with one organization. Below is an example of the PIDs that can be minted at one organization based on the type of content that is being shared Institutions can also retrieve information about their PIDs using our robustly documented API (e.g. https://docs.figshare.com/#description_presenters_articledoi) |
| Article-level metadata must be implemented according to a defined application profile that supports the UKRI Open Access Policy and if possible is available via a CC0 public domain dedication; this must include the persistent identifier to both the Author’s Accepted Manuscript and the Version of Record; the metadata standard must adhere to international best practice such as the OpenAIRE guidelines |
Metadata published are available free of restriction under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Institutional repositories may have overriding terms as set out in the T&Cs link in the footer, but the default is CC0 While we encourage citing of all reuse of academic information, the CC0 copyright waiver is as follows: The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law More information about licenses available in Figshare is here: https://help.figshare.com/article/how-to-choose-the-most-appropriate-license |
| Machine-readable information on the open access status and the license must be embedded in the metadata in a standard non-proprietary format | Figshare’s metadata is machine readable via the API (information here: https://help.figshare.com/article/how-to-use-the-figshare-api) Institutions are encouraged to include a mandatory custom metadata field with prefilled drop-down options that indicate the open access status of the manuscript The license is an already-mandatory metadata field that is also machine readable and can be queried using the API |
| Common unique PIDs for research management information (for example identifiers for funders and /or organizations) are strongly encouraged; ORCID, the researcher identifier, must be supported to identify all authors and contributors | Figshare offers a bi-directional integration with ORCID that allows researchers at Institutions to sync their ORCID and Figshare accounts. More information is available here: https://help.figshare.com/article/how-to-sync-orcid Dimensions Grant IDs are also used to allow funder information to be pulled through to Figshare when researchers are uploading and publishing content GRIDs are included in the metadata that is pushed to DataCite |
| The repository must be registered in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) | figshare.com and all subsequent Figshare for Institutions clients are indexed in OpenDOAR: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/repository/2073?template=opendoar |
This example is from Loughborough University’s Figshare-powered institutional and data repository, https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/.
In this example, Figshare mints a Handle for a journal article in Loughborough’s repository. The Handle is citable when a user clicks on the 'Cite' button as shown below:
The machine-readable metadata fields state the deposited version and the official version of record from the publisher’s date information and the license shown on this page is the license for the metadata and item on Figshare, not the license of the original publisher version of the manuscript. This can be assigned a CC0 license as advised by UKRI:
The linked DOI from the publisher is made available in the metadata:
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