Transformative journals are a form of open access publishing where a hybrid journal (I.e. one that offers both gold and green open access options) commits to transforming to being either fully gold open access or fully green open access. While they do this, they often have agreements with funders that make it permissible to pay for open access in those journals, even where hybrid journals wouldn't be allowed.
Transformative Journals are not the same as Transformative Deals , also known as Read and Publish Deals, which are agreements we have in place with publishers to allow our authors gold open access publishing with publishers we subscribe to. For more information on those, see our List of Read and Publish Deals.
Wellcome Trust and Horizon Europe
If you are funded by the Wellcome Trust and wish to publish in a Transformative Journal you should fill out an Open Access Claim form to arrange payment of the open access fee.
If you are funded by Horizon Europe, you should pay from your grant as with other open access fees.
UKRI
UKRI uses Jisc's definition of transformative journals, which takes a stricter view on what counts as a transformative journal, requiring the journal to permit a compliant green open access route (I.e. allow you to upload the accepted manuscript to Pure with no embargoes and with a CC-BY licence).
If the journal meets this definition then you can either follow the green route and upload the accepted manuscript to Pure or you can fill out an Open Access Claim form to arrange payment of the open access fee.
If the journal doesn't meet this definition then we are not permitted to pay any article processing charges from our UKRI block grant. However, if you have another way of paying the article processing charges (e.g. departmental funds) then the resulting paper would be compliant.
A note on Nature journals
Nature's policy for the following journals typically requires an embargo, which would make them ineligible for UKRI block grant funds. Nature have required a special process for UKRI funded authors to comply with the funder's requirements. Authors should contact their journal and request a "UKRI exceptional publishing agreement". Additionally, UKRI have advised that authors should include a Rights Retention Statement in your submission that states "For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a creative commons attribution (CC BY) licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising".
Nature
Nature Aging
Nature Astronomy
Nature Biomedical Engineering
Nature Biotechnology
Nature Cancer
Nature Cardiovascular Research
Nature Catalysis
Nature Cell Biology
Nature Chemical Biology
Nature Chemistry
Nature Climate Change
Nature Computational Science
Nature Ecology & Evolution
Nature Electronics
Nature Energy
Nature Food
Nature Genetics
Nature Geoscience
Nature Human Behaviour
Nature Immunology
Nature Machine Intelligence
Nature Materials
Nature Medicine
Nature Metabolism
Nature Methods
Nature Microbiology
Nature Nanotechnology
Nature Neuroscience
Nature Photonics
Nature Physics
Nature Plants
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology
Nature Sustainability
Nature Synthesis
Nature Water
If you would like any further advice on this, please email lib-research-support@bristol.ac.uk. Fully open access Nature journals, such as Nature Communications are unaffected and can be paid for through the block grant as normal. 