Research publishing and Open access Latest developments from the Wellcome Trust: November 2004
The Wellcome Trust has been a strong advocate for funding agencies to provide the means and incentives to facilitate greater open access to the research literature. This includes providing financial support for publishing in open access journals, and encouraging deposition of a final version of a peer reviewed manuscript in public access archives, such as PubMed Central (PMC). The Trust is now working in partnership with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to establish a European site for PubMed Central (the free to access, digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, wholly funded by the National Institutes of Health in the United States). In the future, we are proposing that Wellcome Trust grantees will be required to deposit an electronic version of their peer reviewed research articles in PubMed Central (or the European PMC, once established) no later than six months after the date of publication. In addition, the Trust will provide grantees with additional funding to cover the costs of page processing charges levied by open access publishers, such as Public Library of Science and BioMed Central. There will also be additional funding to cover the cost of converting files into the metadata schema required for deposition in PubMed Central. These initiatives were set out in a letter to all UK university vice-chancellors [see http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/assets/wtx022820.pdf] on 1 November 2004 and a question and answer sheet provides more information on them [see http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/assets/wtx022821.pdf.] For a press release on this see [http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX022826.html] Background The Wellcome Trust is actively promoting the 'open access' model of science publishing, to help ensure that scientific research findings are shared as widely and as rapidly as possible. The findings of medical research are typically communicated through specialist publications. Journal publishers arrange for articles to be checked by experts in the field ('peer review'), then publish papers in print and on the web. To access the papers, other scientists need to take out a subscription to the journal or pay a fee to access an individual article. The major drawbacks of this system are that subscriptions can be very expensive and represent an obstacle to the timely sharing of information through the scientific community and more broadly. An alternative approach is 'open access'. All articles are freely available on the web, either by being deposited in an open access repository or by being published in an open access journal with income being derived from contributors, who would pay to have articles published, rather than subscribers. Overall, we believe these approaches are beneficial for medical research: quality can still be preserved through peer review and the overall costs of publishing could well be cheaper. We have commissioned two reports examining the pros and cons of open access, and its potential financial implications. We have also developed a position statement, now under review, [see http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_wtd002766.html] which formally sets out our views. An article which first appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement summarises the key issues from a funder's perspective [see http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX022412.html].
