St Andrews supports new publisher requirements set by Wellcome Trust

Kyle Brady
Thursday 8 September 2016

Wellcome Trust has had an Open Access policy for its research publications since 2005, and now leads the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF). Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services at Wellcome, has announced that from 1 April 2017 any papers submitted that acknowledge Wellcome funding must meet the new, additional requirements. Publishers must indicate that they can meet the service standards by 15 December 2016 to be included in a list that Wellcome will make public. Outputs will be audited to check that listed publishers continue to meet services standards.

Summary

Existing

  • Available from the Europe PMC repository 
  • Made available under a Creative Commons attribution licence 
  • Deposited as the final published version

Additional

  • Publisher invoices must include digital object identifier (DOI), authors, funders and licence 
  • Publisher must have a publicly available reimbursement policy 
  • Publisher must update deposited articles with post-publication material changes

Aims

It is hoped that these changes will:

  • improve article processing charge (APC) processes and minimise post-publication licence corrections; 
  • help authors, funders and institutions determine whether an APC can be reimbursed from COAF; 
  • increase the integrity of funder-designated repositories and the scholarly record by ensuring that the most up-to-date, accurate publication is available.

Although the requirements might seem onerous several major publishers such as Wiley and Springer Nature have already confirmed their ability to comply. Many publishers that already systematically deposit into Europe PubMed Central as part of their Gold publication service already update articles with corrections, retractions and expressions of concern (CREs).

There is widespread community support amongst charities and sector bodies (Jisc, SCONUL, UKCoRR, and Research Libraries UK). The Open Access Support team agrees that the new publisher requirements will help everyone concerned to better understand what is needed for compliance, their obligations, and improve the accuracy and availability of research outputs for re-use. Wellcome has established a reputation as an Open Access leader and many funders including government shadow its initiatives. We hope this initiative might positively encourage publishers to deliver their advertised services and help reduce non-compliance with other funder mandates too.

COAF funded research organisations

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