MRC

POLICY STIPULATIONS

Time Limits

The MRC expects publications to be made openly accessible as soon as possible and in any event within six months of the journal publisher's official date of final publication.

Data should be made available in a timely and responsible manner. A limited defined period of exclusive use of data for primary research is reasonable.

Data must be securely maintained for a minimum of ten years after completion of the research

Data Plan

Applicants are expected to submit a data sharing and preservation strategy at the proposal stage.

This should include a summary of the type of data to be generated, foreseeable research uses, and plans for preparing and documenting data for preservation for sharing. Applicants requesting funds to extend existing data sets should also explain how this adds value and how sharing would provide opportunities for coordination or collaboration.

Guidance on what to include in the plan is available online with the data policy and in an FAQ produced with the DCC.

Access/Data Sharing

The MRC expects publications to be available promptly and encourages researchers to make data available with as few restrictions as possible.

If an open access fee has been paid, MRC requires research papers are licenced such that they may be freely copied and re-used for purposes such as text and data mining.

A data support service is in development to facilitate access and sharing of research data.

Long-term Curation

Data must be properly curated throughout its life-cycle and released with the appropriate high-quality metadata. This is the responsibility of the data custodians, who are usually those individuals or institutes that received MRC funding to create or collect the data.

Primary research data must be retained in their original form within the research establishment that generated them for a minimum of ten years.

Monitoring

No statment is given on how compliance with MRC's open access or data sharing policies will be monitored.

SUPPORT SERVICES

Guidance

The MRC provides support to researchers through data sharing toolkits and best practice guides.

Repository

The MRC supports UK PubMed Central.

Data Centre

The MRC does not run a data centre. The Principal Investigator and HE institution are responsible for long-term access and preservation.

Costs

The MRC will pay any necessary charges levied by publishers who offer Open Access options. Anticipated future publication costs should be part of an institution’s indirect costs.

The MRC data policy does not state that costs associated with data management and sharing will be met.