Wellcome Trust Gets Tough on Open Access
The Wellcome Trust has reacted to Research Councils UK’s beefed-up open-access proposals by indicating that it will get “much tougher” on compliance with its own mandate.
The giant biomedical charity already requires papers produced with Wellcome funding to be made open access within six months of publication, which is the period RCUK also mooted in its draft policy unveiled earlier this month.
But Robert Kiley, the trust’s head of digital services, admitted that the current compliance rate of 55 per cent was “simply not acceptable”.
He said many details of the trust’s get-tough policy were to be determined, but one idea was to make institutions “take some responsibility” for the compliance of their Wellcome-funded researchers. He noted that open-access compliance at the trust’s own Sanger Institute near Cambridge was 85 per cent.
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See Also: New, stronger, UK Research Councils’ policy on Open Access (via Enabling Open Scholarship)
Filed under: Funding, Journal Articles, Open Access, Publishing
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.