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
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Too often, research agendas and funding decisions are shaped in rooms far removed from the people closest to the development challenge.
In 2018, FCDO and Wellcome jointly launched a Joint Initiative on Research in Epidemic Preparedness and Response (JIREP), establishing a cholera research portfolio worth approximately £5.7 million. Nine projects were funded across Bangladesh, Cameroon, the DRC, Ghana, Kenya and USA.
FCDO has published its first Areas of Research Interest (ARI), setting out the key questions where new evidence can make the biggest difference to international development and diplomacy.
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All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated.
