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British Heart Foundation

British Heart Foundation

Funding Body Agreement

Since January 1, 2007, a copy of the final manuscript of all peer-reviewed research papers supported in whole or in part by a British Heart Foundation (BHF) grant must be deposited in an open access archive such as PubMed Central (PMC) or UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), to be made freely available within six months of publication.

Elsevier has established a funding body agreement with BHF to help authors publishing in Elsevier journals comply and to facilitate a successful implementation of their policy. Details about how to comply are outlined below.

Help and Support


Publishing open access

BHF - funded authors are free to choose the (gold) open access option offered by Elsevier. Authors can comply by publishing in either an Elsevier Open Access Journal or in a subscription journal via our Open Access Article program.

To provide open access, a publication fee needs to be met for each article published open access. For information about specific open access publication fees, please refer to the individual journal 's guide for authors.

Upon final publication, Elsevier will immediately send to PubMed Central (PMC) the final published journal article (PJA) as it appears on ScienceDirect. PMC and PMC mirror sites will also link directly to this same article on Elsevier’s websites. All articles published open access have permitted reuse which is determined by the author's choice of user license.

Publication fees

If there are publication costs required for publishing full research articles open access in Europe PMC, BHF will reimburse valid fees, or a proportion of those, equal to the number of funders acknowledged.

If other acknowledged research funders are not funders of UKPMC and the BHF is the major research funder of the reported work, then BHF are prepared to consider paying the full open access fees.

Requests are dealt with on a case by case basis. The University should pay the open access fee in the first instance and then submit a claim stating the BHF grant number to BHF with a copy of the journal’s open access invoice and a copy of the published paper.

Please refer to the individual journal's guide for authors for the specific open access publication fee for your chosen journal.

Green open access

BHF funded authors, who do not have funds available for gold open access can self-archive their accepted author manuscript on Europe PMC after the embargo period for their specific journal has expired.

Posted accepted author manuscripts must include a link back to the original and final published articles.