The Wellcome and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations have joined the “cOAlition S”
In a statement dated November 5th 2018, Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that they are joining the “cOAlition S” and approve the principles of the Plan S. In parallel to this statement, Wellcome has published the details of its new open access policy which will come into effect on January 1st 2020.
Five key changes have been made to its policy:
1. All research articles funded by Wellcome must be freely available on PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC when they are published. The embargo period of six months has been abolished;
2. All the articles must be published under a CC-BY licence;
3. The costs of publication in subscription (hybrid) journals will no longer be covered;
4. When there is an important public health advantage to the rapid, large-scale sharing of prepublications – for example in the case of an epidemic – these must be published:
before peer review
on an approved platform which enables the immediate publication of the whole manuscript
under a CC-BY licence;
5. Organizations funded by Wellcome must sign or publicly commit to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) or the equivalent. This is a new requirement intended to encourage organizations to take into account the intrinsic value of research work when they take promotion and nomination decisions rather than just journal titles or publishers.
