Wellcome Trust Policy

Policy Summary

Wellcome's open access policy applies to articles submitted for publication from 1 January 2021 that include original, peer-reviewed research and was supported by Wellcome funding. All such articles must be made freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC by the final publication date and be published under a Creative Commons attribution (CC BY) licence (or CC BY-ND if approved by Wellcome.) Original scholarly monographs and book chapters authored or co-authored by Wellcome grantholders as part of their grant-funded research should also be made open access.

Routes to Compliance for journal articles

There are 4 routes to compliance with this policy:

Publish in a fully open access journal or platform
Publish in a subscription journal that makes articles open access via a transformative arrangement
Publish in a subscription journal and the author makes the accepted manuscript freely available in Europe PMC on publication
Deposit a CC BY preprint as a version of the article where the above routes are not available

You can check which routes are available with your chosen journal using the Journal Checker Tool. More detail on each of these routes is provided below.

Route 1: Publish in a fully open access journal or platform

You can publish in any journal published by open access publishers such as PLOS, BioMed Central, MDPI and Frontiers, as well as in individual open access journals from other publishers, such as Nature Communications or BMJ Open.

Wellcome will fund fair and reasonable charges for publication in open access journals that:

are indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals and meet cOAlition S requirements
deposit the version of record in PMC and share it with Europe PMC.

If your journal meets these requirements you can apply for relevant charges to be paid from our Wellcome Trust open access block grant.

Apply for Wellcome funds

Route 2: Publish in a subscription journal that makes the article open access via a transformative agreement with the university

Transformative agreements provide our corresponding authors with Wellcome-compliant open access at no extra cost. The university has transformative agreements with many publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, OUP, CUP and others. You can use the Journal Checker Tool to confirm if we have a transformative arrangement that covers your preferred journal. Please note eligibility for transformative agreements is based on the affiliation of the corresponding author.

Where a subscription journal outside of a transformative agreement has been granted Transformative Journal status the open access charges can be paid from our Wellcome open access block grant (until 31 December 2024).

Route 3: Publish in a subscription journal and make the AAM freely available in Europe PMC on publication.

You can publish in any subscription journal providing that the Wellcome Trust funded author takes responsibility for making the author accepted manuscript (AAM) freely available in Europe PMC at the time of publication and under a CC BY licence (or CC BY-ND, if pre-approved by Wellcome).

By applying a CC BY (or CC BY-ND, if approved) licence to all journal submissions authors retain the right to comply via this route. Wellcome have informed publishers of this requirement. However, grantholders must also include the following text with all submissions to peer-reviewed journals in cover letters and funding acknowledgements of the manuscript:

'This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.'

If Wellcome have granted permission for an individual article to be published under a Creative Commons No-Derivatives (CC BY-ND) licence the altenative text below should be included with the journal submission:

'This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number xxxxx]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY-ND public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.'

Before submitting manuscripts to a journal Wellcome-funded authors should check that the terms of the standard publishing contract will not restrict compliance via this route. Researchers should not sign a publishing contract that prevents them making the AAM freely available in PMC without embargo and under a CC BY (or CC BY-ND) licence.

If a journal refuses to accept a submission that makes clear that the AAM is licensed under a prior CC BY or CC BY-ND licence, Wellcome recommend authors reconsider where they publish their research and inform them of the issue.

Where a journal accepts a submission with a prior CC BY or CC BY-ND licence, but on acceptance imposes terms and conditions via a publishing agreement or otherwise that prevent compliance, Wellcome funded authors should follow these steps:

If the journal provides a paid open access option for individual articles, seek to publish via this route and ask the journal to waive the charges. Wellcome funds can’t be used to pay these charges.
If the waiver requested in Step 1 is not given, request an amendment to the publishing agreement via the journal editorial office. Wellcome provide a template addendum.
If the requests outlined in Step 1 and Step 2 above are both rejected by the journal, contact Wellcome (openaccess@wellcome.org)

Authors should also refer to our guidance on the University Research Publications & Copyright Policy for information on how this can help them retain the right to make their accepted manuscripts open access on publication under the CC BY licence.

Route 4: Deposit the preprint server before final publication.

Researchers should use the Version of Record or Author Accepted Manuscript to comply with the policy (routes 1, 2 or 3), where this is possible and depending on the publishing options available to them.

If using a preprint to ensure compliance, researchers must post it to a preprint server indexed by Europe PMC before final publication of the paper, under a CC BY licence.

Making data and software available to other researchers

All research articles supported in whole, or in part, by Wellcome must include a statement explaining how other researchers can access any data, original software or materials underpinning the research. This is in line with our data, software and materials management and sharing policy. Advice and support for this is avaialble from the university research data management service.

Monographs and book chapters

Original scholarly monographs and book chapters authored or co-authored by Wellcome grantholders as part of their grant-funded research must be made freely available via PMC Bookshelf and Europe PMC as soon as possible, with a maximum embargo of six months. The Wellcome Trust grant cannot be used to pay open access fees associated with Wellcome-funded scholarly monographs and book chapters. Instead, researchers should follow the Wellcome Trust procedure for reimbursement of open access fees for scholarly monographs and book chapters.

Where an open access fee is levied by the publisher, the work must be made open access without embargo and be licensed to allow re-use. The Creative Commons CC-BY licence is strongly preferred, but CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-ND licences will be accepted.

Compliance and sanctions

Wellcome may impose sanction on researchers and organisations who do not comply with this policy, including not accepting new grant applications or suspending funding to organisations in extreme cases.

Responsible and fair research assessment

Wellcome are committed to assessing research outputs during funding decisions on the intrinsic merit of the work, rather than the the title of the journal or publisher. They therefore expect organisations that receive Wellcome funding to publicly commit to the principles of responsible research assessment, as the university has done in the Policy Statement on Responsible Research Metrics.