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Open Access & Institutional Repository: Wellcome Trust

Wellcome Trust publishing routes

The Wellcome Trust policy allows both publisher and repository open access.

Rights retention requirement

For all original, peer-reviewed research articles acknowledging Wellcome funding, authors should assign their own CC BY licence to the ‘Author Accepted Manuscript’ by including the following wording in the funder acknowledgements section: This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission”.

Publisher open access

The article is available with a CC BY licence immediately from the journal website. ​The Wellcome Trust will fund open access charges in fully open access journals from the open access block grant administered by the Library but will not pay for open access in ‘hybrid’ journals containing both subscription and open access content. However, authors can publish open access in hybrid journals included in a no-additional-cost-to-the-author ‘transformative agreement’ with the University.

Your article must be made freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC by the official final publication date. The publisher would normally do this if your article is open access in the journal but if the publisher does not provide this service, you must self-archive your Author Accepted Manuscript in Europe PMC.

When you upload your Author Accepted Manuscript to Pure, please apply a CC BY licence and add "Funded by Wellcome Trust" to the Bibliographic notes field. 

 

Repository/self-archiving open access

Using the Rights Retention Strategy which applies to all articles acknowledging Wellcome funding. Authors should assign their own CC BY licence to the ‘Author Accepted Manuscript’ by including the following wording in the funder acknowledgements section: This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission”. This prior retention of rights allows the Author Accepted Manuscript to be made openly available from an institutional repository with no publisher-mandated embargo.

When you upload your Author Accepted Manuscript to Pure, please apply a CC BY licence and add "Funded by Wellcome Trust" to the Bibliographic notes field. Remember to self-archive your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in Europe PMC.

 

Wellcome Trust open access

Wellcome authors: applying for funding for fully open access journals

We can accept applications for open access costs from our Wellcome Trust block grant for:

  • articles to be published in fully open access journals with a CC BY licence

Please apply online at the point of submission rather than acceptance. This enables eligibility to be checked and funds allocated prior to costs being incurred.

  • Applications for APCs must be made on submission using the online form.  If the application is approved, the provisional offer will stand for 6 months, and can be extended if the paper is still undergoing the review process.
  • We can only pay fair and reasonable open access costs.
  • We cannot accept applications for page, colour, cover charges or any extra publication charges not related to open access.
  • You will need your grant Id to complete the form. If the funding was via a studentship please put studentship followed by the student's name

APC Application Form

Please contact eprints@soton.ac.uk with any open access enquiries.

The Rights Retention Strategy

This information comes directly from the Wellcome Trust webpages.

You must include the following text in all submissions:

'This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number xxxxx]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.'

This text must be included in:

  • any cover letter that accompanies the submission
  • the funding acknowledgement section of the manuscript. 

Before submission check the journal’s relevant standard publishing agreement for terms or conditions that may prevent you implementing your right to self-archive the Author Accepted Manuscript at the time of publication and under a CC BY licence.

If a journal refuses to accept a submission which makes clear that any Author Accepted Manuscripts arising from the submission will already be licensed under a prior CC BY licence, you will need to reconsider where to publish your research. In such cases, let us know and we’ll update the journal’s details in the Journal Checker Tool.

Where a journal accepts a submission with a prior CC BY licence, but on acceptance imposes terms and conditions, via a publishing agreement or otherwise, that prevent you from meeting our OA requirements, follow these steps:

  1. If the journal provides a paid open access option for individual articles, seek to publish via this route and request a waiver from the journal for the article processing charge (APC). NOTE: Wellcome funds can’t be used to pay the APC.
  2. If the waiver requested in Step 1 is not given, then request a publishing agreement amendment via the journal editorial office. You can use this template addendum.
  3. If the requests outlined in Step 1 and Step 2 above are both rejected by the journal, contact Wellcome (openaccess@wellcome.org)

CC BY licence exceptions

Wellcome Trust policy requires all journal articles to be published under a CC BY licence. As an exception, you can ask for individual articles to be published under a Creative Commons No-Derivatives licence (CC BY-ND), so that your research cannot be used to create derivatives works without your permission.

To apply for this exception, you should complete a CC BY-ND exception form. You will need to have your request approved by Wellcome before your paper is submitted for publication.

Non Compliant Journals - The Blood journals

Many research funders require outputs underpinned by their grant to be made open access at the point of publication and with a CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution) license. The Blood journals, published by the American Society of Hematology, including their open access title Blood Advances, do not comply because they only offer the more restrictive Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license.  

This may prevent some authors from being able to publish in Blood journals. The only potential route to compliance at present is to include a statement in the acknowledgements assigning a CC BY license to the accepted manuscript arising and manually depositing a copy in the Europe PubMed repository. Please note, we cannot pay publishing charges in Blood Advances until a publisher enabled route to compliance is available. 

If you have any questions please contact the Open Research and Publications Practice Team via eprints@soton.ac.uk