United Kingdom
The UK’s open neuroscience ecosystem is shaped by some of the earliest and most influential open access and open data policies in the world, a mature health data research infrastructure built around NHS linkage, and internationally leading research institutes committed to FAIR data sharing. The UK’s departure from the EU has not diminished its participation in European open science frameworks: UKRI re-associated with Horizon Europe in June 2024, and UK institutions remain active participants in European research infrastructure networks.
Open Science Policy
The principal open science mandates applicable to UK researchers and institutions are summarised below.
| Who | What is required | For whom | In force since |
|---|---|---|---|
| UKRI | Immediate open access under CC BY, research data management plan required | All UKRI-funded researchers | April 2022 |
| Wellcome Trust | Immediate open access under CC BY, no embargo | All Wellcome-funded researchers | January 2020 |
| UK DRI | Public data release within 24 months of data generation, FAIR-aligned sharing | All UK DRI researchers | 2017 |
| EC Open Science Policy | DMP from month 6, FAIR deposit, open access to publications (see Europe) | UK Horizon-associated institutions | 2024 (UK re-association) |
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) implemented one of the most comprehensive national open access policies in the world, effective from April 2022, requiring immediate open access under a Creative Commons licence for all peer-reviewed research articles arising from UKRI funding. UKRI joined cOAlition S and its policy is fully Plan S compliant. The Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest independent research funders, established an open access mandate as early as 2005 and strengthened it to immediate open access with no embargo in 2020, making it one of the global drivers of the Plan S framework. The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN), the founding and largest member of GFRN, coordinates reproducibility and open science practice across UK universities through institutional leads and a programme of training and advocacy. The Turing Way, originally developed at the Alan Turing Institute, is the UK’s most widely used open handbook for reproducible, ethical, and collaborative data science, with over 350 chapters and a global contributor community as of 2024.
Health Data Infrastructure
HDR UK (Health Data Research UK) is the UK’s national institute for health data science, linking NHS organisations, universities, and national health data resources into a coherent research infrastructure. It operates the Innovation Gateway, a unified catalogue of UK health datasets, and coordinates the NHS Research Secure Data Environment network — a federated system of Trusted Research Environments (TREs) enabling secure analysis of sensitive NHS data without data leaving approved environments. OMOP CDM is the HDR UK recommended common data model for NHS research data, and HL7 FHIR underpins EHR interoperability across the network.
UK Biobank is one of the world’s most significant open biomedical research resources, providing genetic, phenotypic, imaging, and linked NHS health data from approximately 500,000 participants to approved researchers worldwide. Its brain imaging sub-study, targeting 100,000 participants with multimodal MRI in BIDS format, constitutes one of the largest population neuroimaging datasets available for secondary analysis.
Neuroscience Research Institutes
UK DRI (UK Dementia Research Institute), established in 2017 across nine university-hosted centres, is the UK’s primary research institute for neurodegenerative disease, with a formal FAIR-aligned data sharing policy mandating public data release no later than 24 months after generation. DPUK (Dementias Platform UK), an MRC-funded platform operated from the University of Oxford, provides secure Trusted Research Environment access to data from over 3 million participants across more than 42 longitudinal cohort studies, harmonised to OMOP CDM and linked to NHS records. Wellcome Sanger Institute (Hinxton, co-located with EMBL-EBI on the Wellcome Genome Campus) contributes large-scale open genomics data relevant to neurological disease genetics, with a rapid-release data sharing policy from founding and deposits to EGA, ENA, EVA, and CELLxGENE. Sainsbury Wellcome Centre (SWC, UCL) is a systems neuroscience institute jointly funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and Wellcome, operating an explicit open science mandate for all data, code, and protocols, and serving as home of the BrainGlobe Initiative, an open-source Python toolkit for computational neuroanatomy compatible with NWB and DANDI Archive workflows.
International Engagement
UK institutions are deeply integrated into international open neuroscience networks. UK DRI is a founding member of the CURE-ND alliance alongside DZNE, Mission Lucidity, and Paris Brain Institute, and participates in JPND. HDR UK maintains formal alignment with EOSC, GA4GH, and RDA. UK Biobank is one of the reference datasets for BBMRI-ERIC’s European biobank network.