Wellcome is updating its open access policy | Wellcome

"There are five key changes to our OA policy.  

1. All Wellcome-funded research articles must be made freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC at the time of publication. We previously allowed a six-month embargo period. This change will make sure that the peer-reviewed version is freely available to everyone at the time of publication.

2. All articles must be published under a Creative Commons attribution licence (CC-BY). We previously only required this licence when an article processing charge (APC) was paid. This change will make sure that others – including commercial entities and AI/text-data mining services – can reuse our funded research to discover new knowledge.

3. We will no longer cover the cost of OA publishing in subscription journals (‘hybrid OA’). We previously supported this model, but no longer believe that it supports a transition to full OA.  

4. Where there is a significant public health benefit to preprints being shared widely and rapidly, such as a disease outbreak, these preprints must be published:

• before peer review
• on an approved platform that supports immediate publication of the complete manuscript
• under a CC-BY licence.

This is a new requirement which will make sure that important research findings are shared as soon possible and before peer review.

5. Wellcome-funded organisations must sign or publicly commit to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment(opens in a new tab) (DORA), or an equivalent. We may ask organisations to show that they’re complying with this as part of our organisation audits. This is a new requirement to encourage organisations to consider the intrinsic merit of the work when making promotion and tenure decisions, not just the title of the journal or publisher...."