Grantholders e-newsletter
Issue 6, September 2006
"Ensuring that the outputs of research are freely available to all is the best way to maximise their utility. Open access is good for science, the research community, and mankind."
Sir John Sulston
Contents
1. Open access – a notice for all Wellcome Trust-funded researchers
2. Stop press: Elsevier joins an ever growing group of publishers with a Wellcome Trust-friendly policy
4. Open access - improve your impact
1. Open access – a notice for all Wellcome Trust-funded researchers
A reminder that from 1 October 2006, the Wellcome Trust requires all Trust-funded researchers to make their peer-reviewed research papers available through PubMed Central (PMC) as soon as possible, and in any event no later than six months after publication.
From January 2007, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) will be available as the UK's equivalent repository.
Additional funding has been made available, which can be used to cover open access article processing charges.
By making research papers available via PMC and UKPMC, authors will benefit from:
- higher visibility
- innovative links to related datasets
- long-term preservation.
Visit our open access pages for all you need to know about open access, funds for publishing and how to go about it.
2. Stop press: Elsevier joins an ever growing group of publishers with a Wellcome Trust-friendly policy
Elsevier has made an agreement with the Wellcome Trust that will allow authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with the Trust's requirements.
Other publishers include:
See also the PMC homepage and the Directory of Open Access Journals.
...and from October 2006, there will be a full list of journals and their publishing policies available from the SHERPA database.
3. Submitting papers
Papers can be deposited in PMC in one of two ways. Firstly, by publishing in a journal that offers an open access option and, as part of this, agrees to deposit the final, published version of the paper in PMC on the author's behalf and make it freely available on the day of publication. Journals that offer this service will typically charge an article-processing fee, the cost of which can be met through the additional funding that the Trust has made available.
Secondly, if the journal does not offer an open access option, then the author manuscript should be self-archived in PMC. Download a quick guide on how to comply with our requirements [PDF 80KB] or see the interactive guide to the submission process for self-archiving for further details.
Current grantholders have already been contacted with their PMC login and password that allows them to self-archive when necessary. New grantholders are contacted after they receive their first award from the Trust. If you are unsure whether you already have access to PMC, or you have lost your login and password, please contact Liz Shaw.
4. Open access - improve your impact
A recent (peer-reviewed) article in PLoS Biology has found that open access (OA) articles are cited more than non-OA articles. Gunther Eysenbach from the University of Toronto, Canada, compared citation data for papers published - either with OA or not - in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences between June and December 2004. He discovered "strong evidence that, even in a journal that is widely available in research libraries, OA articles are more immediately recognized and cited by peers than non-OA articles published in the same journal". Eysenbach goes on to conclude that open access "is likely to benefit science by accelerating dissemination and uptake of research findings".
Eysenbach G.
Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biol 2006;4(5):e157.