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It is the Wellcome Trust's policy that papers arising from research that was funded wholly or partially by a Trust grant are made freely available online (or on “open access”).
This page provides background information on the Trust's policy, together with advice for Bristol researchers who wish to reclaim the cost of open access fees charged by publishers.
Contact information: WT administrator Jenny Harris - <jenny.harris@bris.ac.uk>
It is one of the Wellcome Trust’s grant conditions that papers arising from research that was funded wholly or partially by a Trust grant are made freely available online (or on “open access”):
“electronic copies of any research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and are supported in whole or in part by Wellcome Trust Funding, to be made available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PubMed Central as soon as possible and in any event within six months of the journal publisher’s official date of final publication”
All Trust-funded research papers submitted for publication under the 'author pays' open access route to be licensed using the Creative Commons, Attribution-only licence (CC:BY licence).
The Trust monitors grant holders’ compliance with this condition. Monitoring will include reviewing annual reports and end of grant reports, and randomly checking research papers. Please check that all of your papers are visible on PMC within six months of publication.
Below is a simple guide to the steps that authors must take to meet this requirement. You might find it useful to refer to the Trust’s guide Journals frequently used by Wellcome Trust grantholders:, which gives advice on how to comply when publishing in the journals most popular with Wellcome authors. The Trust’s Complying with Open Access flow diagram provides a useful overview of the procedure for complying. More details about the policy and the process are available on the Trust website:
PubMed Central is a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), developed and managed by NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information in the US National Library of Medicine.
Europe PubMed Central (EuropePMC) mirrors the data held in PMC: the databases are synchronised twice a day. A minority of publishers have not yet agreed to allow their content to be mirrored, and thus this content is not directly available from UKPMC. However, all searches are currently run at the US PMC site and therefore all matching papers will be retrieved in any search of either repository.
The Trust’s requirement applies only to primary peer-reviewed papers. The following do not need to be made open access:
However, new papers arising out of past and now defunct Trust research grants are covered.
Papers may only be submitted to journals with publishing policies which are compliant with the Wellcome Trust’s requirements. Before submitting a paper, authors should check the Trust’s guide Journals frequently used by Wellcome Trust grantholders. If the journal does not appear in this list, check the Sherpa Romeo database of publishers' open access policies. Here you can search or browse for publishers or journal titles, although in some cases only the publisher is listed. For example, PNAS does not appear but its publisher, the National Academy of Sciences, does. Publishers with a green tick next to Wellcome Trust are permitted. (If anything is unclear, check the agreement that the publisher has with the Wellcome Trust. There should be a link to this from Romeo.) Where a journal is not listed, the Wellcome Trust advises that authors seek clarification directly from the journal’s editorial staff.
Please ensure that the paid open access option provided by your publisher is Wellcome Trust compliant and not solely open access from the publishers own website.
To claim open access funding please ensure that the journal you choose to publish through offers a paid open access option which is Wellcome Trust compliant (CC:BY); the article will be deposited in PMC by the publisher. Detail of what the publisher offers will available on their website.
Romeo indicates which publishers offer this method. A search for Oxford University Press, for example, shows that this is a Wellcome Trust compliant publisher (green tick next to the Trust’s name) and that it has a paid open access option for certain titles. If this option is available, you may click the link in the publisher record next to “paid access” to view the policy on the publisher’s website. .
The Wellcome Trust has provided the University of Bristol with a special grant to cover publishers’ open access fees, which is administered by the University Library. Wellcome Trust grant holders who are also members of the University may apply for support from this grant by completing a claim form.
The claim form may only be submitted if:
The Library can arrange payment of the open access fee directly to the publisher or, if the publisher has already been paid, reimburse the appropriate department. Please indicate on the claim form which option applies. Note that page and colour plate and other publication charges cannot be paid under this scheme (but Trust-funded researchers can use the inflation/flexible funding allowance or FFA to cover these costs).
The following documents are required before payment can be made:
We can supply a purchase order number if the publisher insists on one.
If the publisher asks for contact details for the invoice, use Wellcome Administrator, University Library, Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1TJ.
For further advice about claiming open access fees, please contact wellcome-oa@bris.ac.uk
If the publisher does not offer a paid open access option, or does not undertake to deposit the paper in PMC, authors can still satisfy the Trust’s grant conditions by self-archiving (although, as with paid open access, the journal must still be Wellcome Trust compliant). Self-deposit in PMC is free of charge. There are more details about this option in section 15 of the Trust’s authors’ guide.
Pure, the University's research information system (RIS) provides an option for making your published research open access via the Explore Bristol Research website. This is not a mandatory requirement of the Wellcome Trust.
Many other research funders also now require that published results are made open access, but they do not offer a special grant to meet the cost as Wellcome does. Self-deposit in EuropePMC or Pure is still free for such purposes. For more information about the policy of other funding bodies check the Sherpa Juliet database.