With thanks to colleagues at the University of Cambridge Open Research team, who have provided the following update in light of recent changes to Cancer Research UK’s open access policy:

Cancer Research UK (CRUK) have recently updated their open access policy and have announced that from 1 April 2026 they will no longer be providing any funding for publishing costs, which includes block grants, use of institute core grants and grant underspends. As of 1 October 2026 all CRUK financial support for open access publishing will end.

CRUK funded researchers are still required to make their research open access in line with their funder’s policy. This means that articles must still be made available under a CC BY licence within 6 months of publication, unless researchers have permission from CRUK to use a CC BY-ND licence. Furthermore, an electronic version must be made available through Europe PMC in the same timeframe.

Researchers can continue to comply with the CRUK policy by following one of the routes below: 

1. Publish in a fully open access or hybrid journal which makes the version of record open access immediately on publication. Typically, the journal deposits the final publication in EPMC on the authors’ behalf.  

Note: we are currently in a transitional period until 1 October 2026. During this window, researchers with existing grants may still utilise the remaining CRUK block grant funds to cover article processing charges, subject to Cambridge’s available balance. We recommend checking with the Open Access team to see if there is still budget in the block grant that will cover your paper. After 1 October, please check our updated Paying for an APC page to see if your paper would be eligible even without the support of the CRUK block grant. 

2. Publish in a subscription journal and make the Author Accepted Manuscript (or the published version, where the journal permits) available no later than six months after publication. This is the new default CRUK route. To make use of this route, we ask authors to submit their Author Accepted Manuscript via Symplectic Elements on acceptance, using the University’s Self-Archiving Policy (SAP) when applicable. Typically, the author self-deposits the Author Accepted Manuscript on Europe PMC.

3. Continue to publish in a journal that has a Read & Publish agreement with the corresponding author’s institution. This facilitates immediate open access at the point of publication. You can read about Cambridge’s Read & Publish agreements here. Deposit via Europe PMC will be journal dependent. 

We strongly encourage authors to continue to deposit their Author Accepted Manuscript into Symplectic Elements upon acceptance for timely advice.