Trust Acts to Open Research Findings to the Public - NYTimes.com

“The trend toward open access scientific publishing gained strength last week when the Wellcome Trust, the second-largest nongovernmental funder of scientific research in the world, said it was considering sanctions against scientists who do not make the results of their research freely available to the public. The London-based trust, which funds £650 million, or about $1 billion, of medical and scientific research every year, already has a policy requiring researchers to “maximize the opportunities to make their results available for free” and a presumption in favor of publication in open access journals available on the Internet. But Sir Mark Walport, the trust’s director, told the Guardian newspaper that only 55 percent of Wellcome-funded researchers comply. Scientists often prefer to publish in journals that refuse to make the work available without paying a fee. One option reportedly under consideration is to withhold the last installment of a grant until the research is publicly available; another option would be to make grant renewal contingent on open access publication. The open access movement arose in response to the high subscription fees for scientific journals, which in some cases can amount to thousands of dollars a year. Initiated by scientists, the movement has grown rapidly in recent years, partly because of support from university librarians who saw their acquisitions budget swallowed up by rising subscription costs. The success of journals such as PLoS One, an on-line journal that began by publishing 138 articles in 2006 and is now the largest scientific publication in the world, has also encouraged imitation. Last year the Wellcome Trust announced that it would begin a new open-access journal, eLife, aimed at competing with prestigious subscription-based publications such as Science and Nature. — D. D. GUTTENPLAN”