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.  This presentation, delivered at the recent Berlin 8 meeting, reviews the progress that has been made over the past 5 years – in terms of compliance with the mandate, providing the infrastructure to support open access, and working with publishers to help them develop “Wellcome-compliant” publishing policies – and outlines what additional steps the Trust needs to take to help realise the full potential of its open access mandate.

Looking forward, the presentation also discusses the aspirations of the Wellcome Trust to transform UK PubMed Central into a single, Europe-wide repository for life-sciences research and, more generally, considers how research funders could help to influence innovation in scientific publishing in the open access arena.

View the presentation