Wellcome Trust have just updated their open access policy which will last until Jan 2020. Although Swansea does not have a large number of Wellcome funded academics this is an interesting development as it follows a big review and is an attempt to work within the Plan S policy put forward by the European Commission.
- It stipulates that articles must be freely available through PubMed Central as soon as they are published.
- They have to be published under a CC-BY licence.
- They will only fund articles in journals which appear in DOAJ and will not cover publishing in subscription journals.
- All research articles will have to include a statement explaining how other researchers can access the data, software and materials underpinning the research.
- They encourage publication of preprints under a CC-BY licence.
- When they assess research outputs for funding they will judge on intrinsic merit, not the title of the journal or publisher.
As the cost of publishing in “hybrid” journals has kept rising and they are harder to discover than articles in fully open access journals this could be the start of a trend. One to watch….