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These pages are designed to help UCL researchers understand the requirements of the Wellcome open access policy for different types of publication.
The Wellcome Trust requires all funded publications reporting original research to be made available in Europe PMC immediately upon publication, with the Creative Commons CC BY licence, and to include a data availability statement. Their open access policy applies to research publications supported, in whole or in part, by Wellcome. Special provisions apply to monographs and book chapters (see below).
Research articles
Gold open access
Papers published Gold/fully open access with a CC BY licence comply with Wellcome's policy, providing the final published open access version is deposited in Europe PMC.
- Wellcome does not pay for Gold open access in subscription (hybrid) journals, and does not contribute funding for subscription journals in UCL's transformative agreements. However, Wellcome-funded papers with UCL corresponding authors can still be published Gold open access in journals that are included in UCL’s transformative agreements, and will comply with Wellcome's policy.
- Funding is available for research articles in fully open access journals, whether or not they are in one of UCL's agreements.
See our step-by-step guide for information about publishing with Gold open access.
Rights retention
Where a paper is not published Gold/fully open access, the author must use rights retention to apply the CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript version, which must then be deposited in Europe PMC for immediate Green open access. See our step-by-step guide for how to retain your rights.
Where the author cannot retain their right to apply CC BY to their accepted manuscript (and the paper is not Gold/fully open access), their paper will comply with Wellcome's policy if a preprint is made available before publication, under a CC BY licence, in a preprint server indexed in Europe PMC.
Licence exceptions
Wellcome may grant permission to use the more restrictive CC BY-ND licence for research articles on a case-by-case basis. This applies to Gold/fully open access papers, and manuscripts made open access with rights retention. Requests for this licence exception must be made using Wellcome's CC BY-ND request form, and approved before submitting the paper.
Monographs and book chapters
The Wellcome open access policy includes scholarly monographs and book chapters authored or co-authored by grant holders, as part of their grant-funded research. These publications must be deposited in NCBI Bookshelf as well as Europe PMC. While Wellcome prefers that these publications are open access as soon as possible after publication, under the CC BY licence, it allows the following provisions:
- monographs and book chapters may be embargoed for six months from the date of publication before being made available in Europe PMC and NCBI Bookshelf.
- researchers can choose other Creative Commons licences if CC BY is not appropriate.
Wellcome will fund compliant Gold open access for monographs and book chapters: contact Wellcome directly to request funding. If your publisher does not have a compliant Gold option, but allows you to make your accepted manuscript open access in Europe PMC/NCBI Bookshelf six months after publication, you should deposit using Wellcome's deposit form.