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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 mandate, and what steps needed to be taken to achieve full OA for all Trust funded research papers.

At a poster session at the Open Repositories Conference 2009, Peter Millington (Technical Development Officer st Sherpa) presented data on the number of publishers/journals used by Wellcome-funded authors that offered a Wellcome-compliant OA publishing policy. Taking a cohort of 3766 papers published in 901 different journals, Millington shows that potential compliance increased from 70% in 2006 to 87% in 2009.

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 of compliance with the Wellcome Trust OA mandate.