Date of compliant deposit

The date of compliant deposit is the date on which a copy of a work, together with its required metadata, is placed in a repository (or equivalent system) in a way that satisfies the specific requirements of a given mandate, policy, or piece of legislation. Because different funders, institutions, and national assessment exercises define compliance differently, a single work can have multiple distinct “dates of compliant deposit” — one per policy it is being checked against — rather than one universal date.

How the UK REF defines it, precisely

The UK Research Excellence Framework is the context where this term carries the most operationally precise, funder-specific meaning, and that definition has changed with REF’s own policy cycle. Under the REF open access policy, the deposited output is expected to be the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (the peer-reviewed, post-review version, not the publisher’s typeset PDF) with its metadata, deposited in an institutional or subject repository. For outputs published between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2025, the compliant-deposit deadline is no later than three months after the acceptance date. For outputs published from 1 January 2026 onward, under the REF 2029 policy, the deadline shifts to no later than three months after the date of first publication instead of acceptance — a deliberate change from an acceptance-anchored to a publication-anchored clock. A stated exception applies where a work misses the three-months-from-acceptance window but is still deposited within three months of its earliest publication date, provided all other policy requirements are otherwise met.

Why this matters operationally

Because REF (and comparable funder mandates elsewhere) checks compliance as of the date of deposit, not the date a paper is later noticed to be missing, a late deposit is not curable by backdating — the actual date the record met the policy’s requirements is the one that counts for eligibility, which is exactly why research offices track this as a distinct, monitored data point rather than treating “it’s in the repository now” as sufficient. See date of deposit for the simpler, mandate-independent event, and date of first open access and date of end of embargo for the related timeline milestones a compliant deposit interacts with.

Worked example / counter-example

A journal article accepted on 1 March 2025 and deposited, with full metadata and the correct manuscript version, on 20 May 2025 has a compliant-deposit date within the three-months-from-acceptance window then in force, and is REF-compliant on that ground. An article accepted on the same date but deposited only in October 2025 — more than three months after acceptance, and only checkable against the earliest-publication fallback if publication itself occurred late enough — risks non-compliance regardless of how quickly it is corrected afterward, because the clock is measured from the actual historical date, not from when the gap is discovered.

References

• REF 2029 Open Access Policy, Research England / REF partnership guidance (2029.ref.ac.uk).