Wellcome Trust open access policy

From 1 January 2021, the Wellcome Trust open access policy has changed. In alignment with Plan S, the new open access policy requires all research articles which arise from Wellcome funding to be:

• made freely available at the time of publication
• openly licenced under a CC BY licence

The Wellcome Trust open access policy applies to:

• Any published research outputs submitted for publication after 1 January 2021.
• Peer-reviewed publications fully or partially funded by Wellcome Trust.
• Wellcome Trust require electronic copies of any original research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal to be made freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC by the official final publication date.
• It does not apply to PhD theses by Wellcome-funded students, but the funder expects PhD theses to be made freely available as soon as possible.

How do I comply?

There are three publishing routes you can follow to comply with Wellcome’s policy:

• Publish in a fully OA journal or platform.
• Publish in a subscription journal through a transitional agreement that is available to you via the University.
• Publish in a subscription journal and take responsibility for self-archiving the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM), including making this version freely available from Europe PMC at the time of publication under a CC BY licence.

More information

Further guidance on the policy and achieving compliance is available on our Plan S funder policies page.