Wellcome Trust: researcher compliance with our open access policy mandate remains a key priority | Gold Open Access Infrastructure

"Monitoring and raising researcher compliance with our open access policy mandate remains a key priority for the Wellcome Trust. In June last year we announced measures to increase compliance with the policy – introducing specific sanctions for researchers and their institutions who fail to comply. In addition to these sanctions, we strengthened our policy with the requirement that where our funds are used to meet an Article Processing Charge (APC), the licence provided by the publisher permits all types of re-use (including commercial re-use). In partnership with Research Councils UK, we have supported the development of the new Sherpa FACT resource to help authors select the correct option and licence when publishing in different journals. At the present time, monitoring and enforcing our policy is a labour intensive process and the information available to us to track compliance at even the most basic level is often far from perfect. For example, identifying Trust-funded research papers within the Europe PMC repository depends on the authors acknowledging our funding contribution correctly. But acknowledgement practice is currently far from consistent – meaning that our compliance data fails to capture a significant proportion of papers that do not acknowledge the Trust’s support, and includes several papers which have been wrongly attributed. The FundRef initiative should play an important role in helping to ensure funder information is collected in a consistent manner moving forward, and we are also in the process of rolling out an on-line tool to capture output data from our funded researchers across the lifespan of their grant. While the data available to us to monitor compliance with our long-standing policy mandate is currently limited, the information to determine whether authors are complying with our new requirements in relation to open access licences is not captured at all. The routine collection of metadata on the licence associated with a paper would aid enormously in enabling us to begin to monitor routinely whether researchers are selecting the appropriate licence option, and to assist us in providing guidance and support to our communities. Projects currently underway, such as the NISO working group on standards for open access metadata and indicators and the JISC APC pilot should go some way to help resolve these issues and enable us to track open access more effectively."