WELLCOME AND NIH OPEN ACCESS PLANS
Excerpt: ‘The Wellcome Trust, Europe’s largest research charity, has become the latest grant-giving body to throw down the gauntlet to academic publishers in the debate over open-access literature. All papers reporting the results of research funded by the trust will in the future have to be placed in a central public archive within six months of publication, the organization said on 4 November. The move could bring the trust into conflict with publishers, who often hold exclusive rights on the use of such material. This in turn could restrict researchers’ choices about which journals they publish in….Researchers funded by Wellcome could find that the new rules create some difficult choices. Some publishing houses, such as Elsevier, which publishes more than 1,800 journals including Cell and The Lancet, do not currently allow any version of a paper they have published to be placed on a public archive other than on websites restricted to the author’s research institution. "This will put publishers and researchers in a difficult position," acknowledges Robert Terry, a senior policy adviser at the trust’s London headquarters. But Terry believes that journals will modify their policies to allow papers to go to central archives. He points out that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is considering putting similar requirements on the research that it funds (see Nature 431, 115; 2004). "It would be quite a strange [biomedical] journal that didn’t include research funded by the NIH and the Wellcome Trust," he adds.
