UK’s Wellcome Trust Mandates Open Access
The UK’s Wellcome Trust, an early and ardent supporter of open access, is putting its grant money where its mouth is, requiring that grantees deposit articles generated with Wellcome funds into the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) PubMed Central open access repository. As of October 2005, "all Wellcome Trust grantees will have to submit an electronic copy of the final manuscripts of their research papers into PubMed Central (PMC)," to be made "freely available to the public, via the web, no later than six months after the official date of final publication."
In addition, the Wellcome Trust says it will encourage grantees to embrace open access publishing, by providing them with additional funding to cover the costs of page processing charges levied by open access publishers, including the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central. Wellcome Trust officials also announced that the trust is working with a number of other major science-funders in the UK, including the Arthritis Research Campaign, Cancer Research UK, British Heart Foundation, and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to "explore the feasibility of establishing a UK PubMed Central." In a news release, the officials said they were now seeking a formal tender process, to identify a contractor who can "run and develop a UK-PMC service that will be launched early in 2006." The Wellcome Trust is one of the world’s largest biomedical research charities, spending over £400 million ($708.8 million) annually to support 3500 researchers in 44 countries. See <http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/>.
[Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), The Publishing Report, October 6, 2005]
