Wellcome Trust to Crack Down on Paper Sharing Slackers

“The United Kingdom's Wellcome Trust is putting more teeth into a requirement that grantees make their published papers freely available to the public. In an announcement today, the Wellcome said it will begin taking specific steps to sanction researchers who fail to comply with the sharing policy. Since 2006, the Wellcome has asked researchers it funds to submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts to the public UK PubMed Centraldatabase for posting within 6 months after they're published in a journal... But only 55% of eligible papers are being deposited, Wellcome's tracking finds, a compliance rate that Director Mark Walport called ‘simply unacceptable’ today in a press release and letter (below) to institutions and grantholders. Starting immediately, institutions with Wellcome funding must certify in final grant reports that related papers published since 1 October 2009 are in compliance or they will lose their last grant payment. Papers that aren't shared will not count in a researcher's track record, and researchers must make sure all their Wellcome Trust-funded papers are in compliance to renew grants or receive new grants. Wellcome Trust Media Relations Manager Craig Brierley says that until now, Wellcome has ‘frequently reminded’ grantholders about the so-called ‘open access’ policy, but ‘there were no defined sanctions.’ (‘Open access’ can also refer to journals that charge authors a fee and make papers freely available when they're first published; the Wellcome Trust will pay such author fees for its grantees.) By contrast, the U.S. National Institutes of Health says compliance with its similar, 4-year-old requirement that papers be posted in its PubMed Central archive is now 75%, according to a March report (p. 11-12) (hat tip to this open access blog). The agency doesn't consider compliance with the policy a factor during scientific peer review but deals with it administratively and can ‘delay or prevent awarding of funds,’ the agency says. One difference from the Wellcome Trust policy is that NIH allows a 12-month delay, which might make it easier for researchers to find journals that agree to the policy.”