A report published today looking at how to improve access to academic literature suggests that open access is likely to have the greatest benefits to the UK scholarly communications system. Open access, whereby research outputs are made freely accessible to the widest possible audience, is an issue to which the Wellcome Trust is firmly committed. The Trust provides funding to its researchers to cover open access publishing costs.
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.
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.
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.
The Company of Biologists (COB) – publishers of Development and Journal of Cell Science – has developed an open access (“gold”) option, which meets the requirements of the UKPMC Funders’ Group.
In October 2006 the Wellcome Trust become the world’s first research funder to develop an open access policy that required the research outputs, that arose from its funding, to be made freely available.
