Open access: expanding the reach of research
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) open access policy, (published December 2025), ensures that research funded by public money is freely available to everyone, easy to find and ready to use.
At its heart, the policy is about maximising impact. When FCDO funded research is openly available, it can be used and built on by policymakers, practitioners, researchers and community organisations around the world. This speeds up learning, reduces unnecessary duplication, and helps evidence travel faster into real world decisions on international development, diplomacy and global challenges.
Open access also reflects the FCDO’s commitment to treating research as a global public good. Removing barriers to research access supports fairer participation in knowledge creation and use and strengthens international collaboration through shared evidence and ideas.
What the policy means in practice
In practical terms, the policy requires that:
• open access is mandatory for all new FCDO funded research, and for some existing agreements
• written research outputs intended for external publication must be made freely and immediately available online, with no restrictions on access or reuse beyond proper attribution
• research outputs must be easy to discover and preserved online to ensure long term access
• it applies to a wide range of outputs, including journal articles, preprints, books, book chapters and specified research reports
• where appropriate, the FCDO will cover reasonable and proportionate open access publishing costs
By widening access to research and evidence, the FCDO’s open access policy helps ensure that UK public investment in knowledge delivers lasting value, not just at home, but globally.
See more
Flow Batteries are electrochemical devices that store electrical energy in liquid electrolytes and convert it back to electricity when needed. In 2025, the Faraday Institution commissioned a study to assess the performance of different flow battery technologies and evaluated their potential contribution to clean energy transitions in emerging economies.
The Frontier Tech Hub is launching OASIS: a shared, open platform for AI in development. It’s a place to find tools other people have built, discuss what’s working, and build on it rather than starting again.
Beyond the Axis is part of the Cross-border Conflict Evidence Policy and Trends (XCEPT) programme. The project set out to understand how Iranian arms transfers to allied groups has changed over time, and was ultimately able to explain how and why Iran, and its ‘Axis of Resistance’ allies have proven more resilient than expected in the wake of the regional crises since October 2023.
TEA is the flagship FCDO research and innovation platform supporting early-stage testing and scale up of innovative clean energy technologies and business models in developing countries, targeting the 655 million people still without access to electricity.
Your starting point for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) funded research and development.
Quick links
All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated.
