Research support changes coming early next year

There are lots of changes ahead for Cranfield in the area of research, so we thought we’d outline them here for you… 

1. New CRIS

The new CRIS is live from 15 December with Phase 1 of the implementation. You can keep up to date with all the current news and view the project timeline by checking the project intranet page. Q and A drop-in sessions will run early in 2024 – look out for further announcements!

2. UKRI Open Access Policy

The second part of the UKRI Open Access policy, which relates to publishing books, edited works and book chapters, comes into effect on 1 January 2024. If you have a grant from UKRI and are planning to publish longform output after 1 January, please ensure you know what you need to do in order to be compliant.

The core requirements are:

• your final Version of Record or Author’s Accepted Manuscript must be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publisher’s website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication
• images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content should be included in the open access version, where possible
• the open access version of your publication must have a Creative Commons licence, with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence preferred. An Open Government Licence is also permitted. (This requirement does not apply to third party materials included in your publication).

More advice is available from our open access guide.

3. Cranfield’s Institutional Rights Retention Policy

Cranfield has introduced an institutional rights retention policy to help ensure our authors can keep control over their own work and for Cranfield research to be as open as possible. This also comes into effect from 1 January 2024. If, as a Cranfield author, you need an exemption to the policy for any reason (you need a more restrictive licence for your work, for example), you simply contact the Library research support team to let us know (contact details below).

Read the new Institutional Rights Retention Policy.

Read our guide to learn more about rights retention.

4. Open Research

Cranfield will be publishing a statement on the University website in support of Open Research in early 2024, and we will be creating a new open research guide on our Library Services website. You may also be interested in signing up for free events being run during the national Open Research Week which runs from Monday 26 February to Friday 1 March 2024.

Open Research Week is a series of events which discusses new, developing and current practice in all things Open Research.  It is organised by Edge Hill University, the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University, and the University of Essex.

All events are free, and you can register for each one individually.  All sessions will be recorded, so if you cannot attend, please sign up and these recordings will be sent out in due course.  As a specific call to action, please feel free to share with your colleagues, contacts and comrades that are interested in Open Research.  All are welcome.

Open Research Week web page

Open Research Week 2024 events

5. Contacting your Library Services research support team just got simpler!

To make it easier for you to contact us for help we have set up a new email address: researchsupport@cranfield.ac.uk

This is replacing the following email addresses:

• researchdata@cranfield.ac.uk
• labnotebooks@cranfield.ac.uk
• accepted@cranfield.ac.uk

Our team will be taking a break after 15 December, but we’ll be back in on 2 January to help you with any research support queries.

Have a wonderful break!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay