Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, February 25, 2007

Publisher accommodation and resistance to the Wellcome Trust OA policy

Jim Till, Compliance with Wellcome Trust’s OA policy, Be openly accessible or be obscure, February 24, 2007.  Excerpt:

The BioMed Central Open Access Colloquium on “Open Access: How Can We Achieve Quality and Quantity?“, held on February 8, 2007, included a very interesting presentation by Robert Kiley, Head of e-Strategy of the Wellcome Library. His presentation was part of the session on “The open access imperative: where are we now, and where do we want to be?“, and was entitled: “Funding open-access publications“. His PPT presentation can be downloaded.

The presentation includes some noteworthy information about compliance of publishers with the OA policy of the Wellcome Trust (WT)....

Information from Slide 7 of the presentation:

Significant number of commercial and not-for-profit publishers now offer an OA option that is fully compliant with the Trust’s requirements (e.g. PLoS, BMC, Elsevier, OUP, CUP, BMJPG, Sage, Taylor & Francis)“.

Other publishers allow the author to self archive a version of the final article and make that available within 6 months (e.g. Nature, AAAS, AMA, Am. Physiological Assoc)“.

However, some publishers have policies that do not allow Wellcome-funded authors to publish in these titles. High profile publishers that do not offer a WT-compliant policy include the American Association of Immunologists, and the American Association for Cancer Research“.

Slide 8 presents information obtained via the RoMEO database. The data indicate that 59% of biomedical publishers are compliant with the WT OA policy, 15% are in active discussion (with WT about the policy), 16% currently have no publicly-available policy, and 10% are non-compliant with the policy.

Slide 9 shows that, of the WT-compliant publishers, 75% permit compliance via the self-archiving (Green OA) route and 17% via a paid OA option. Both options are offered by 8% of WT-compliant publishers....

The audio aspect of Robert Kiley’s presentation is also available....

Increasing numbers of funding agencies, with the WT in a crucial leadership role, have become major representatives of the public interest, in the escalating tug-of-war between those who support OA and those who, at present, do not. Information of the kind outlined above is badly needed, to foster evidence-based policy decisions by funding agencies.