Wellcome Trust and COAF Open Access Spend, 2014-15 | Wellcome Trust Blog

"Once a year we ask all those institutions in receipt of an open access (OA) grant from the Trust to provide details on how the grant has been spent.  In 2014 six research funders established the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) in order to provide a single funding mechanism to cover Article Processing Charges (APCs).  The data supplied by institutions for the 2014-15 report therefore covers APC spend on articles arising from research funded by Arthritis Research UK, Breast Cancer Now, Bloodwise, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust. Following the approach we adopted last year, this blog post provides details of the total spend on OA publishing and considers to what extent papers are freely available through the Europe PMC repository and licenced in accordance with our requirements (i.e. made available under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY)).  In summary, we find that hybrid open access continues to be significantly more expensive than fully open access journals and that as a whole the level of service provided by hybrid publishers is poor and is not delivering what we are paying for.  The post concludes with a set of action items aimed to rectify these problems ..."