Wellcome Trust and publishers reach agreement on open access

Three publishers, Blackwell, OUP and Springer, have today announced changes to their license conditions that will provide for research published in their journals to be immediately available on line and without charge to the reader.

Ongoing discussions have taken place between the Wellcome Trust and several publishers following the Trust’s move to make it a condition of funding that research is deposited in PubMed Central or the UK version of it, once established, as well as available from publishers own sites.

Supporting the move by Blackwell, OUP and Springer, Dr Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, said:

“We are delighted to have achieved this agreement with Blackwell, OUP and Springer. It is good news for them, for us, and most importantly, for the scientific community at large.

“It is essential that the market is innovative and leads the way in showing how business models can evolve and adapt to maximise the impact of published research.”

Under the new conditions, research articles and supporting documentation will be made freely available online to view immediately upon publication. The charges for this process will be met by funding bodies, such as the Wellcome Trust - who calculate it will represent approximately 1% of their annual spend. The articles published in this way will be available through Blackwell Online Open, OUP Oxford Open and Springer Open Choice services.

Dr Jan Velterop, director of Open Access at Springer, said:

“Springer is keen to provide the publishing model that is needed and desired by the scientific community and most appreciative of the Wellcome Trust leading the way to enable publishers to make a transition from traditional publishing to sustainable open access.”

Bob Campbell, president of Blackwell Publishing said:

“If there are customers who want to pay for open access then as publishers we should offer them the appropriate services.

"Our experience in doing this will be shared with our society partners who are all interested in how the market might develop and whether there are new sustainable business models.”

Martin Richardson, managing director of Oxford Journals at OUP, commented:

"Our experimentation with open access models gives the Wellcome Trust and other funding agencies the choice of paying for immediate free access to their articles, with unrestricted reuse for education and research purposes. It will also enable us to find out whether open access can be a long-term sustainable financial model for publishing high quality, peer-reviewed journals."

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee will further consider the future of scientific publishing today (Thursday 15th) at a Westminster Hall debate on the Committee’s report into the issue.

In October this year the Wellcome Trust announced that all papers from new research they fund must be deposited in PubMed Central, or the UK version once it has been established, within 6 months of publication. All Wellcome Trust funded research will need to be deposited in there from October 2006.

Blackwell partners with 665 societies in publishing 805 journals Already around 80 of these journals participate in the Online Open scheme, such as The Journal of Physiology and Molecular Microbiology. If this initiative is successful then other journals published by Blackwell will join in.

Oxford Journals, a Division of OUP, publishes over 180 journals covering a broad range of subject areas, two-thirds of which are published in collaboration with learned societies and other international organizations. 23 of these journals are currently published under an open access model, with a further 19 journals due to join 'Oxford Open' in January 2006.

The Open Choice option is available for all of Springer's 1200+ journals, in all disciplines covered.