1. Funding body requirements
UKSG Webinar
26th March 2014
Robert Kiley
Wellcome Trust
@robertkiley

2. Agenda
Discuss the Wellcome OA policy, including compliance, costs and sanctions
Look at key challenges relating to OA

3. OA: a one slide primer
Definition of OA is the ability to read and re-use content
Open access (OA) can be achieved through two primary routes, known as gold and green OA.
gold OA: journals make articles immediately available on the internet; may incur article processing charge (APC)
green OA: authors deposit a version of the article in a repository, often after an embargo.

4. Wellcome OA policy
“any research papers …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 & Europe PMC as soon as possible and in any event within six months of final publication”
Sanctions in place, for non-compliance
Wellcome Images,CC-BY, L

5. OA policy – why? To maximise the impact of research
Wellcome believes that the full research and economic benefit of published content will only be realised when there are no restrictions on access to, and reuse of, this information
Estimated that Human Genome Project provided a RoI of 141:1
Wellcome Images, CC-BY, L

6. Compliance with the Trust’s policy

7. Gold or green?
Trust supports “green” and “gold” OA, though with a strong preference for gold
Gold – version of record, zero embargo, re-use rights
Green – embargoes, author manuscript version limited re-use rights, and reliance upon subscription model
…and wasn’t the point of OA that we want access now…with licences that facilitate re-use?
*Looking at the 50 journals most used by Wellcome-funded authors in 2012 (and excluding all the fully open access journals,) we see that just 10% of these allow self-archiving at zero months. This is a long way short of the evidence presented to the Committee. If we look further – and see how many of these journals allow self-archiving at six months – the position improves, but not by much. Specifically, just 38% of the Top 50 journals used by Wellcome authors allow self-archiving at 6 months;62% of the these journals require a longer embargo period
Wellcome Images, CC-BY, L

8. Enforcing compliance specific sanctions for non-compliance:
withholding final payment on grants, until assurance papers listed on final reports are compliant
requiring previous Trust-funded papers to be compliant before any funding renewals or new grants awards are activated
discounting non-compliant Trust-funded papers as part of a researcher’s track record
Still a little early to assess the full effect of these measures

9. The CC-BY requirement
OA policy now specifies that research articles, for which an OA fee is paid, must be licenced using CC-BY
Trust believes that full research and economic benefit of published content will only be realised when there are no restrictions on access to, and reuse of, this information
Requirement introduced from April 2013
All major publishers now offer CC-BY
….though publishers experiencing some problems in fully implementing this

10. Licence issues: an example
Article at PMC – vague licence terms
Licence info in footnotes is clear
Licence terms contained in the * attribute – not minable

11. Supporting open access
Providing dedicated funding to meet OA costs
including books and monographs
Developing Europe PubMed Central repository with 24 partner funders
Funding eLife – a top tier, open access journal
Advocacy: working with researchers, institutions, and publishers to make OA easier

12. Funding open access (1)
View dissemination as an integral cost of funding research
Provide dedicated funds meet OA costs
Estimate that cost of paying for all Trust papers via the gold route would be 1% to 1.5% of total research spend
Average APC £1816 (based on data)
5000 papers a year (5000 x 1816) = £9m
Research spend (2012) £687.5M – 1.32%
…but is it a functional market ….?

13. Funding open access (2) Range of APCs paid (2012-13)*
OA fees paid through block grants, by Wellcome grantees
No. articles
2144
1690
1301
Mean OA paid
£1816
£1872
£1808
Median OA paid
£1837
£1889
£1875
*Data available at Figshare

14. OA - key challenges Developing infrastructures –
linking subject and institutional repositories; systems for paying APC’s; determining publisher OA policies
Addressing concerns around licences, especially for humanities and social sciences scholars
Publishers experiencing difficulties in expressing licences in OA articles
And cost….
Wellcome Images, CC-BY, L

15. Meeting the costs of OA
Growing concern that hybrid publishers are being paid twice (subscriptions and APC’s)
Concern exacerbated by recent study which showed that average APC in a hybrid journal was almost twice that for a born-digital, full open access journal ($2,727 compared to $1,418)

16. Encouraging a functional OA market: policy options
1. Funding APCs for full OA journals, and only funding APCs for hybrids that offset APC revenues by reducing subscription charges at a local (institutional) level;
2. Setting multi-tier price caps for the maximum they will contribute towards an APC for particular journals, based on the quality of services they provide;
3. Covering only a fixed percentage of the APC once the APC exceeds a threshold – with authors (or institutions) covering the shortfall
Trust looking to work with funders to explore these options

17. Further information