Wellcome Trust OA mandate starts tomorrow
Open Access a Must for Wellcome Trust Researchers, a Wellcome Trust press release, undated but released today. Excerpt:
Next week (October) the Wellcome Trust becomes the first scientific research funder to insist that papers emanating from its grant awards are placed in an open access repository. From the 1st October it will become a condition of funding, that papers will have to be posted on PubMed Central (PMC)– the free-to access, life sciences archive developed by the National Institutes of Health – and made accessible within 6 months of publication. To facilitate this, the Wellcome Trust has – with the help of NIH – established a manuscript submission system, through which papers accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal can be deposited in PMC. From the 1st October next year all existing Trust grant holders will have to deposit future papers into PubMed Central. This delay will allow existing grant holders time to adjust to the new policy and let us know what problems – if any – they may experience, affording us time to overcome them. During this time the Trust, working in partnership with other UK life sciences funders, plans to establish a UK version of PubMed Central – UKPMC.
Wellcome-funded researchers should submit their papers to PMC via the NIH manuscript submission system and consult the Wellcome page of manuscript submission information.
