1. Open research: from the perspective of Wellcome
Finland’s Open Science and Research Forum
November 16th 2017
Robert Kiley, Wellcome Trust
Head – Open Research
ORCID: 
Slides made available under

2. About Wellcome
Independent research funder – whose mission is to improve health by helping great ideas to thrive
Funding commitment of £1bn a year – for the next 5 years
Support research in the life sciences, but also in humanities, social science and public engagement

3. Wellcome and Open Research
Committed to ensuring research outputs can be accessed and used in ways that maximise health & societal benefit
Making these outputs more widely available holds the potential to:
accelerate discovery and its application
help ensure findings can be validated and reproduce
increase efficiency – reduce duplication and waste
Dedicated Open Research team established

4. Managing and sharing research outputs – Wellcome policy
New policy on managing and sharing data, software and materials
Key elements of the policy are:
expect all researchers to maximise access to research data, software and materials with as few restrictions as possible
require an outputs management plan - where the research is likely to generate significant outputs of clear value as a resource
commit to review and support costs of output management plans
new policy clarifies our expectations of researchers in several key respects – particularly requirement to share underlying data & code at the time of publication

5. Open access to research publications

6. Meeting OA costs (Wellcome COAF)
Hybrid OA 52% more expensive that full OA
Median APC increased by 6% over past 12 months

7. Open access – Wellcome policy
Mandatory
Research articles must be made available at time of publication – or in any event within 6 months
Fully fund OA APC’s
Require deposition (by publisher) in PMC with CCBY licence when APC paid
Around 80% of Wellcome-attributed articles made OA in line with policy

8. Wellcome and Open Access
Seek to provide researchers with range of publishing opportunities
Supporting new publishing platform – Wellcome Open Research (WOR) and continuing to support eLife
Continues to fully fund OA publication costs – both hybrid and full OA
Strong supporter of preprints

9. Wellcome Open Research

10. Wellcome Open Research: making the sharing of results….
Faster
Transparent
Reproducible
Inclusive
Cost-effective

11. Wellcome Open Research: making the sharing of results….
Faster
Transparent
Reproducible
Inclusive
Cost-effective

12. Wellcome Open Research: making the sharing of results….
Faster
Transparent
Reproducible
Inclusive
Cost-effective

13. Wellcome Open Research: making the sharing of results….
Faster
Transparent
Reproducible
Inclusive
Cost-effective

14. Wellcome Open Research: making the sharing of results….
Faster
Transparent
Reproducible
Inclusive
Cost-effective
Average APC for Wellcome Open Research - £793 (inc. VAT)
Average APC across all journals used by Wellcome authors - £2044 (inc. VAT)

15. Rise of funder platforms….
Growing number of funder platforms – including Gates, Health Research Board, and others
Development of Open Research Central
Currently an aggregation service
In time, potentially a “funder agnostic” publishing platform

16. Preprints
Preprints seen as another way in which dissemination of research outputs can be made faster and more inclusive (i.e. all types of outputs – not just research articles)
Wellcome grantee’s can now cite preprints in grant applications and end of grant reports
Significant growth in both the number of preprint submissions and preprint servers
Source:

17. Next steps for Wellcome

18. Review our OA policy Policy in place since 2005; last reviewed in 2012
Landscape changed
OA is mainstream
OA publication costs are increasing & scant evidence that effective market forces are at play
New options to consider – role of preprints, Scholarly Communications Licence, Wellcome Open Research, offsetting deals etc
Early modelling suggest that over next 5 years we will
spend between £37m and £46m on APC costs

19. The future: some closing thoughts
The publishing ecosystem will continue to evolve
Preprinting (in the life sciences) will become standard practice
Open, signed peer review will also become widely adopted and integrated into the services “preprint servers” offer
Overlay journals – where experts identify the best/novel/ground-breaking research – will (in the life sciences) become a reality
Articles will become fully actionable – no longer static documents (e.g. see eLife’s “Reproducible Document Stack, or the Code Ocean platform)
Publishers will adopt “freemium” model – a “read only” copy available for free, revenue comes from other services (e.g. help researchers find the best/most impactful research, alerting services, tools is make used of the data etc.)
Data, not publications, will become the new currency of the realm for researchers

20. Questions?