Earlier this month HEFCE invited advice on developing their open access policy in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF).
Both EMBL-EBI, who run the Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) service, and the UK members of the Europe PMC Funders’ Group, strongly support HEFCE’s movement towards requiring that all outputs submitted to the post-2014 REF are published open access. However, both groups also have concerns about HEFCE’s exclusive focus on institutional repositories (IRs), and recommend that in addition to IRs HEFCE also include subject repositories, such as Europe PMC, as a valid archive for research submitted to the post-2014 REF.
You can read the full EMBL-EBI response here, and the full Europe PMC Funders’ Group response here.