A presentation by Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust) given at the annual conference of the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries that looks at the Wellcome Trust experience with the author-pays, open access model. Looking at Wellcome-funded papers published in the quarter of 2010, Kiley calculates that the average cost of papers published under the author-pays […]

Wiley have announced the launch of Wiley Open Access, a new publishing programme of open access journals.  The first three titles – Microbiology Open, Brain and Behavior and Ecology and Evolution – will all launch later in 2011. Wiley Open Access journals will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits use, […]

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have announced that they will be launching a fully open access journal  – Scientific Reports – in July 2011. Funded entirely through article process charges ($1350 per published article), Scientific Reports will publish “original research papers of interest to specialists within a given field in the natural sciences.  It will not set a threshold […]

A new study commissioned by the Knowledge Exchange argues that there can be benefits to publishers if they switch to a model based on submission fees. The report “Submission fees – A tool in the transition to Open Access?”, written by Mark Ware, concludes that this model could be particularly relevant to journals with a […]

At the Wellcome Trust we are always keen to try new ways to promote our open access policy, and the UKPMC repository. Our latest promotional activity involves a huge poster in the rear window (Gower Place) of the Wellcome Trust HQ, in London. In addition to promoting OA, the poster also provides the opportunity for […]

The Wellcome Trust’s Open Access policy has always made it clear that it considers dissemination costs as legitimate research costs and as such provides grantholders with additional funding, through their institutions, to cover open access charges. In view of this I thought it would be interesting to see how many papers, attributed to the Wellcome […]

The Company of Biologists (COB) – publishers of Development and Journal of Cell Science – has developed an open access (“gold”) option, which meets the requirements of the UKPMC Funders’ Group. For a fee of £1350, the COB will deposit the final version of the article in PubMed Central (at the time of publication) and […]

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 – […]

The Open Access subset of UKPMC articles – which as of October 7th 2010 contains around 195,000 full-text articles – can be downloaded via: http://ukpmc.ac.uk/ftp/oa The content are available as 20 zipped files, named according to the PMCID range that each zipped file contains. The files are updated weekly.

An analysis of publication data for 2009 identifies a total 5263 Wellcome–attribured articles in PubMed, of which 2313 are freely available in UKPMC. This indicates an overall open access compliance figure of around 44%. Looking at the data more granularly, we can also see which journals are most used by Wellcome-funded authors. In total, some […]

Karger Publishers have introduced an open access option, known as “Author’s Choice”. In return for a fee of CHF 3,000, Karger will make an article freely available (at the time of publication) through http://www.karger.com/ , as well as depositing the final version directly into PubMed Central. Articles routed through this mechanism are licenced under the […]

The American Society for Microbiology have launched a full online only, open access journal, known as mBio. In an attempt to “break away from the current publication model”, mBio editors will “either accept or reject manuscripts and will request only minor revisions; editors generally will not require authors to make extensive modifications or perform additional […]

The Royal Society has announced plans to develop a transparent pricing policy in which the subscription cost of its journals are linked to the uptake of author-pays, open access articles. “From 2012 we shall implement a new and more transparent pricing policy in which the price of each journal is tied to the number of […]

Open Access can offer universities real cost saving benefits, claims Alma Swan in a report – ‘Modelling Scholarly Communication Options: Costs and Benefits for Univeresities’, published in February 2010 (download here: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/442/). Swan claims that the move to Open Access can ‘disrupt systems and processes that have been in place for a very long time’ […]

The Wellcome Trust, on behalf of the UKPMC Funders’ Group, held a workshop in September 2009, for HEI repository managers and research/open access administrators, to discuss the issues involved in ensuring that funder open access mandates are met. Prior to the workshop, a questionnaire was distributed to delegates, to identify the different barriers (and the […]

The Endocrine Society – who publish titles such as the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and Endocrinology – have developed an open access option for Wellcome Trust funded authors. “The Endocrine Society will offer authors supported by the Wellcome Trust the option of meeting the publication requirements of the Trust by paying for an […]

As Open Access Week 2009 gets underway, the Wellcome Trust has called for greater transparency among publishers to counter the argument that access fees are being paid twice – once through subscriptions and again through publication fees. The call comes as the Trust announces a further £2 million to fund open access publication fees for […]

The Wellcome Trust, on behalf of the UKPMC Funders’ Group, held a workshop on the 24th Spetember, for HEI repository managers and research/open access administrators, to discuss the issues involved in ensuring that funder open access mandates are met. The workshop was split into two sessions. The morning session focussed on the practical aspects of […]

The first Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference took place in Lund between the 14-16th September 2009. The full set of presentations will be made available from the conference site within the next week or so. Robert Kiley, from the Wellcome Trust, spoke about the Trust’s open access policy, grantee compliance with the OA […]

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have announced the development of a licence that will explicitly permit academic reuse of archived author manuscripts. “NPG supports reuse for academic purposes of the content we publish. We want the excellent research that we publish to help further discovery, and recognize that data-mining and text-mining are important aspects of that,” […]

Presentation given at the RIN/RSP conference Research in the Open: how mandates work in practice on the 29th May 2009. The presentation looks at a number of funder open access mandates, with special reference to the Wellcome Trust’s policy and its implementation. The presentation also considers the author-pays model and provides data on the level […]

The Royal Society have announced a change in the pricing structure for its author-pays, open access model, known as EXiS Open Choice. Responding to author feedback, EXiS fees will now be based on a per-article rate, rather than a per-page rate. There are now two article rates: Full research articles and reviews are priced at […]

Research Councils UK (RCUK) have published an independent study commissioned by the Research Councils into open access to research outputs. The purpose of the study was to identify the effects and impacts of open access on publishing models and institutional repositories in light of national and international trends. This included the impact of open access […]

As reported by Jennifer McLennan (Association of Research Libraries) on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list: 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public […]

UK PubMed Central(UKPMC) is the the UK’s online digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed research publications in the life sciences. This blog has been created as a way of alerting researchers to: new service developments at UK PubMed Central changes to publisher policies in terms of open access and self-archiving relevant news from the open access […]