Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 20:01:04 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
Forwarding from the Wellcome Trust. This position statement is now
online at the WT site,
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/awtvispolpub.html
Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]
A position statement by the Wellcome Trust in support of open access
publishing
The mission of the Wellcome Trust is to "foster and promote research with
the aim of improving human and animal health." The main output of this
research is new ideas and knowledge, which the Trust expects its
researchers to publish in quality, peer-reviewed journals.
The Trust has a fundamental interest in ensuring that neither the terms
struck with researchers, nor the marketing and distribution strategies
used by publishers (whether commercial, not-for-profit or academic)
adversely affect the availability and accessibility of this material.
With recent advances in Internet publishing, the Trust is aware that
there are a number of new models for the publication of research results
and will encourage initiatives that broaden the range of opportunities
for quality research to be widely disseminated and freely accessed.
The Wellcome Trust therefore supports open and unrestricted access to the
published output of research, including the open access model (defined
below), as a fundamental part of its charitable mission and a public
benefit to be encouraged wherever possible.
Specifically, the Trust:
· welcomes the establishment of free-access, high-quality
scientific journals available via the Internet;
· will encourage and support the formation of such journals
and/or free-access repositories for research papers;
· will meet the cost of publication charges including those for
online-only journals for Trust-funded research by permitting Trust
researchers to use contingency funds for this purpose;
· encourages researchers to maximize the opportunities to make
their results available for free and, where possible, retain their
copyright, as recommended by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Public Library of Science, and
similar frameworks;
· affirms the principle that it is the intrinsic merit of the
work, and not the title of the journal in which a researcher's work
is published, that should be considered in funding decisions and
awarding grants.
As part of its corporate planning process, the Trust will continue to
keep this policy under review.
Definition of open access publication1
An open access publication is one that meets the following two
conditions:
1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a
free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual (for the lifetime of the
applicable copyright) right of access to, and a licence to copy,
use, distribute, perform and display the work publicly and to make
and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any
reasonable purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship2,
as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for
their personal use.
2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials,
including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable
standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial
publication in at least one online repository that is supported by
an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or
other well-established organization that seeks to enable open
access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term
archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a
repository).
Notes:
1. An open access publication is a property of individual works, not
necessarily of journals or of publishers.
2. Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to
provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and
responsible use of the published work, as they do now.
The definition of open access publication used in this position statement
is based on the definition arrived at by delegates who attended a meeting
on open access publishing convened by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
in July 2003.
