A reminder that from 1 October 2006, outputs from all Wellcome Trust-funded grants must be made freely available via PubMed Central (PMC) - or UK PubMed Central once established - as soon as possible, and in any event no later than six months after publication.

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. See the interactive guide to the submission process for details.

Further information about the policy and what it means to Trust-funded researchers can be found in the authors' guide and FAQ.

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".

External links

• Eysenbach G. Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biol 2006;4(5):e157.