This Webinar will provide delegates with an overview of the Wellcome Trust and RCUK OA policies. It will discuss current levels of compliance, and key issues which need to be addressed if full OA is going to be realised. The Webinar will also discuss the recent study, led by the Wellcome Trust, which looked at what levers funders could pull to help encourage the development of an effective OA market for article processing charges.

1. Funding body requirements
UKSG Webinar
26th March 2014
Robert Kiley
Wellcome Trust
r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk
@robertkiley

2. Agenda
1. Discuss the Wellcome OA policy,
including compliance, costs and
sanctions
2. 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, L0026422

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
https://www.genome.gov/27544383
Wellcome Images, CC-BY, L0038828

6. Compliance with the Trust’s policy
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Compliance(%)
Month
% of papers in PMC
% of papers in PMC
Linear (% of papers in PMC)

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?
Wellcome Images, CC-BY, L0040558

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 2012-13 data)
• 5000 papers a year (5000 x 1816) = £9m
• Research spend (2012) £687.5M – 1.32%
• …but is it a functional market ….?
£0
£1,000
£2,000
£3,000
£4,000
£5,000
2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 2010/11 2011/12 2012/2013
Value£'000
Financial Year
Total Open Access Expenditure Oct 2005/06 to Sept 2012/13
Includes Open Access Block Grants and Supplementations
Grand Total Open Access

13. Funding open access (2)
350
401
491
685
91
38 61
24 2
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
0-1000 1001-1500 1501-2000 2001-2500 2501-3000 3001-3500 3501-4000 4001-5000 5001-6000
Numberofarticles
Range of APCs paid
Range of APCs paid (2012-13)*
2012-13 2011-12 2010-11
No. articles 2144 1690 1301
Mean OA paid £1816 £1872 £1808
Median OA paid £1837 £1889 £1875
OA fees paid through block grants, by Wellcome grantees
*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, L0026444

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
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/openaccess