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Scientific
publishing
A position statement by the Wellcome Trust in support of
open access publishing
The mission of the
Wellcome Trust is to "foster and promote research with the aim of
improving human and animal health." The main output of this research
is new ideas and knowledge, which the Trust expects its researchers
to publish in quality, peer-reviewed journals.
The Trust has
a fundamental interest in ensuring that neither the terms struck
with researchers, nor the marketing and distribution strategies used
by publishers (whether commercial, not-for-profit or academic)
adversely affect the availability and accessibility of this
material.
With recent advances in Internet publishing, the
Trust is aware that there are a number of new models for the
publication of research results and will encourage initiatives that
broaden the range of opportunities for quality research to be widely
disseminated and freely accessed.
The Wellcome Trust
therefore supports open and unrestricted access to the published
output of research, including the open
access model (defined below), as a fundamental part of its
charitable mission and a public benefit to be encouraged wherever
possible.
Specifically, the Trust:
- welcomes the establishment of free-access, high-quality
scientific journals available via the Internet;
- will encourage and support the formation of such journals
and/or free-access repositories for research papers;
- will meet the cost of publication charges including those for
online-only journals for Trust-funded research by permitting Trust
researchers to use contingency funds for this purpose;
- encourages researchers to maximize the opportunities to
make their results available for free and, where possible,
retain their copyright, as recommended by the Scholarly Publishing
and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and as practiced by
BioMed Central, the Public Library of Science, and similar
organizations;
- affirms the principle that it is the intrinsic merit of the
work, and not the title of the journal in which a researcher's
work is published, that should be considered in funding decisions
and awarding grants.
As part of its corporate planning
process, the Trust will continue to keep this policy under
review.
Definition of open
access publication1
An open access publication is
one that meets the following two conditions:
- The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a
free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual (for the lifetime of the
applicable copyright) right of access to, and a licence to copy,
use, distribute, perform and display the work publicly and to make
and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any
reasonable purpose, subject to proper attribution of
authorship2, as well as the right to make small
numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
- A complete version of the work and all supplemental
materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above,
in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately
upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is
supported by an academic institution, scholarly society,
government agency, or other well-established organization that
seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution,
interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical
sciences, PubMed Central is such a
repository).
Notes:
- An open access publication is a property of individual works,
not necessarily of journals or of publishers.
- Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue
to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and
responsible use of the published work, as they do
now.
The definition of open access publication used in
this position statement is based on the definition arrived at by
delegates who attended a meeting on open access publishing convened
by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in July 2003.
The
Trust commissioned SQW economic and management consultants to
undertake an economic analysis of the scientific publishing market,
which helped to inform this position statement. View the Economic
Analysis of Scientific Research report.
SQW were
commissioned to undertake a second report entitled Costs and
Business Models in Scientific Research
Publishing.
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