Wellcome Trust open access policy

The  Wellcome Trust open access policy  was changed on 1 January 2025. Wellcome will only fund the cost of article processing charges for research articles published in fully open access journals or platforms indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. 

 All publications that report original research supported by Wellcome (in whole or in part) must:

• be made freely available from Europe PubMed Central upon publication
• be under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, or a CC-BY-ND licence by exception
• include a data availability statement in line with their data, software and materials management and sharing policy

The Wellcome Trust open access policy applies to:

• all original research publications that have been supported, in whole or in part, by Wellcome
• all original scholarly monographs and book chapters authored or co-authored by Wellcome grant holders as part of their grant-funded research

The policy does not apply to:

• PhD theses by Wellcome-funded students. However, the funder expects PhD theses to be made freely available as soon as possible
• textbooks, ‘trade’ books, general reference works or works of fiction
• collections edited, but not authored, by Wellcome grant holders

How do I comply?

For journal articles, there are three publishing routes you can follow to comply with the policy:

• Publish in a fully OA journal or platform.
• Publish in a subscription journal through a transitional agreement 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.

What about long-form publications?

Separate funding is available to cover publishers' open-access monograph and book chapter processing charges. However, the block grant provided to the University for open access cannot be used to cover the cost of open access fees associated with Wellcome-funded scholarly monographs and book chapters. 

All original scholarly monographs and book chapters authored or co-authored by Wellcome grant holders as part of their grant-funded research must:

• be made freely available through the NCBI Bookshelf and Europe PMC as soon as possible. This must be within six months of the official final publication date

Where an open access fee is charged, the outputs must also:

• be made openly available without embargo and licensed to support their re-use

Wellcome’s preferred licence is a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY). However, researchers may publish their work under any Creative Commons licences, including non-commercial and non-derivative licences (CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-ND).

How to request open access funding for monographs and book chapters?

Email the following details to openaccess@wellcome.org:

• your current employing organisation
• title of the monograph or book chapter, including the volume description (where the monograph is part of a series)
• Wellcome grant reference number
• publisher name
• proposed date of publication
• cost of the open access fee

The Wellcome Trust will supplement your research grant and enable you to claim reimbursement for these additional costs.

Funding for open access continues to be available even after a Wellcome Trust research project grant has closed.

This funding excludes non-open access publication costs, including page and/or colour charges.

More information

Further guidance on the policy and achieving compliance with Plan S funder policies.

Open access publishing options for monographs and book chapters.