Wellcome Trust calls for greater transparency from journals on open access publishing costs
19 October 2009
The call comes as the Trust announces a further £2 million to fund open access publication fees for its researchers over the next 12 months. The funds are part of the ongoing commitment to ensuring that the results of all Trust-funded research are made freely available online.
Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, comments: "We are deeply committed to ensuring that research outputs are accessible to the widest possible audience. We are committing £2 million over the next year to support our researchers to make this happen and will be working closely with other funders, publishers and the research community towards this aim."
Since 2005, the Wellcome Trust has made it a condition of funding that researchers are required to make any Trust-funded publications available within six months through UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), the UK's life sciences online archive. The Trust will meet publication costs where the publisher agrees to make articles freely available through UKPMC at the time of publication and to license these works in a way that facilitates re-use, subject to proper attribution.
In recent months, however, concern has been expressed by the research community that publishers are using open access fees as an additional revenue stream without making a concerted effort to adapt their business models. In other words, access fees are being paid twice, through subscriptions and through publication fees.
"We would like to see a commitment from publishers to show the uptake of their open access option and to adjust their subscription rates to reflect increases in income from open access fees," says Sir Mark. "Some publishers, for example Oxford University Press, have already done this and we would like to see all publishers behave the same way."
UKPMC developments
Through a development programme, managed by the British Library in consultation with the UKPMC funding organisations and the academic community, UKPMC is currently being developed with the aim that it becomes the information resource of choice for the UK biomedical and health research communities.
Key developments include providing the functionality - through text and data mining technologies - to integrate research articles with a range of other online sources, such as gene, protein and chemical compound databases, and to integrate a range of bibliographic databases - including Medline, Patents and Agricola - into a single, seamless discovery tool. The new UKPMC site will go live early in 2010.
Visit the Open Access Week website here.
Contact
Craig Brierley
Senior Media Officer
Wellcome Trust
T +44 (0)20 7611 7329
E
c.brierley@wellcome.ac.uk
Notes for editors
The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity in the UK. It funds innovative biomedical research, in the UK and internationally, spending over £600 million each year to support the brightest scientists with the best ideas. The Wellcome Trust supports public debate about biomedical research and its impact on health and wellbeing.
UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) is a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Based on PubMed Central (PMC), the US National Institutes of Health free digital archive, UKPMC provides a stable and permanent online archive of full-text peer reviewed research publications.