BMJ Open – BMJ’s new online-only, open access journal – has been launched.

A presentation by Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust) given at the annual conference of the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries that looks at the Wellcome Trust experience with the author-pays, open access model. Looking at Wellcome-funded papers published in the quarter of 2010, Kiley calculates that the average cost of papers published under the author-pays model — either through a hybrid or full open access option – was $2,367.

Wiley have announced the launch of Wiley Open Access, a new publishing programme of open access journals.  The first three titles – Microbiology Open, Brain and Behavior and Ecology and Evolution – will all launch later in 2011.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have announced that they will be launching a fully open access journal  – Scientific Reports – in July 2011. Funded entirely through article process charges ($1350 per published article), Scientific Reports will publish “ original research papers of interest to specialists within a given field in the natural sciences.

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. UKPMC is now “Zotero enabled”, which means that users can store the bibliographic details of any UKPMC article directly into their Zotero Library.

The complete archive of the Eugenics Review journal – from 1909 through to 1968 when the title ceased – has been digitised through the Wellcome Library’s Backfile Digitisation Project, and is now freely available at UKPMC and PubMed Central.

A new study commissioned by the Knowledge Exchange argues that there can be benefits to publishers if they switch to a model based on submission fees. The report “Submission fees – A tool in the transition to Open Access?”, written by Mark Ware, concludes that this model could be particularly relevant to journals with a high rejection rate.

Over 240 National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) trainees recently attended the 4th Annual meeting at the Midlands Hotel in Manchester (November 30th – December 1st). Despite the freezing temperatures outside, the atmosphere inside was warm, welcoming and friendly. The term ‘trainee’ is probably quite inappropriate, as it evokes the image of fresh young graduates.

At the Wellcome Trust we are always keen to try new ways to promote our open access policy, and the UKPMC repository. Our latest promotional activity involves a huge poster in the rear window (Gower Place) of the Wellcome Trust HQ, in London.

The Wellcome Trust’s Open Access policy has always made it clear that it considers dissemination costs as legitimate research costs and as such provides grantholders with additional funding, through their institutions, to cover open access charges.