Objectives To understand the publishing priorities, especially in relation to open access, of 10 UK biomedical research funders.

Design Semistructured interviews.

Setting 10 UK biomedical research funders.

Participants 12 employees with responsibility for research management at 10 UK biomedical research funders; a purposive sample to represent a range of backgrounds and organisation types.

Conclusions Publicly funded and large biomedical research funders are committed to open access publishing and are pleased with recent developments which have stimulated growth in this area. Smaller charitable funders are supportive of the aims of open access, but are concerned about the practical implications for their budgets and their funded researchers. Across the board, biomedical research funders are turning their attention to other priorities for sharing research outputs, including data, protocols and negative results. Further work is required to understand how smaller funders, including charitable funders, can support open access.