Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy

Outputs that need to be open access

  • Journal Articles
  • Peer Reviewed Conference Papers in proceedings with an ISSN Number
  • Books, chapters and Monographs

Protocols, systemic reviews, scoping reviews and meta-analyses do not have to be made open access, but the library are permitted to use Wellcome Trust funds to pay for APCs for these output types.

Comment pieces, editorials, book reviews and similar articles do not need to be made open access, though you can still make them open access using the Scholarly Works Policy.

The policy does not apply to textbooks, ‘trade’ books, general reference works or works of fiction, or to edited collections that are edited, but not authored, by Wellcome grant holders.

Open Access Funding

The Wellcome Trust provide the university with a block grant to pay for fully open access journal fees. You can also use our open access deals to get gold open access in hybrid journals at no cost to you.

Wellcome will pay for open access book charges. Contact the Wellcome Trust for more details.

Instructions

Journal articles and conference papers

The Plan S Journal Checker Tool will tell you if you can publish compliantly in a journal. You can use our Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy Flowchart (PDF, 74kB) to interpret the results and our open access for journal articles page for instructions on how to make the article open access.

You need to ensure that either:

  • The final published version is available immediately on publication on the publisher's website with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.

Or

  • The Accepted Manuscript is available in Europe PubMed Central immediately on publication with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.

If needed, researchers can apply to The Wellcome Trust to use a CC-BY-ND licence.

While upload of the accepted manuscript to EPMC is sufficient for this policy, we still need a record in Pure for audit purposes.

Books, Chapters and Monographs

Our open access books and chapters page provides guidance on how to make your book open access. You need to ensure that:

  • The final published version is available on the publisher's website
  • Has a Creative Commons licence (Preferably CC-BY)
  • Is made freely available through NCBI Bookshelf PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC as soon as possible and no later than within 6 months of the official final publication date

If you your publisher requires payment to do so, you should contact The Wellcome Trust for support.

Additional Resources