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Wellcome research articles: what do I need to do?

This page explains what steps researchers should take to make their research articles open access, in accordance with requirements from the Wellcome Trust.

To comply with the Wellcome open access policy, peer-reviewed research articles must be made available in Europe PMC upon publication with the CC BY licence (or CC BY-ND by exception), and include a data availability statement. If you need assistance with any of the steps below, check our Wellcome open access FAQ, or contact UCL's Open Access Team. 

What do I need to do?

  1. Acknowledge your funding by naming Wellcome and providing the grant number. See Wellcome's guidance on acknowledging funding.
  2. Include a data availability statement in your article: this explains how to access your paper's underlying materials (e.g. data, software). Example statements can be found on Wellcome's webpages (in the "more information" section). For information on open data requirements, see our research data policies webpage.
  3. Publish Gold/fully open access:
    Journals included in UCL's transformative agreements are Wellcome compliant. To use the agreements, the article's corresponding author must be at UCL. Proceed with submission, following the links to publisher instructions in the list of journals in UCL's agreements, and choose CC BY when accepted for publication.

    Fully open access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals are Wellcome compliant. Some fully open access journals are included in UCL's agreements (if so, see above), but if they are not, request funding by completing this form.

If your journal does not comply through Gold/fully open access, use rights retention. UCL's updated Publications Policy allows authors publishing in subscription journals not in UCL's transformative agreements to meet Wellcome's requirements. The accepted manuscript version of articles submitted from the start of the policy can be made open access in UCL Discovery and Europe PMC without an embargo, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY). Follow the steps on our UCL Publications Policy: actions for authors page, adding a rights retention statement to your paper when you submit, and uploading your accepted manuscript to UCL’s Research Publications Service (RPS) and Europe PMC on or before publication. See the UCL Publications Policy support pages for more information. 

Wellcome encourages researchers to post preprints of funded research under a CC BY licence. If you cannot publish Gold/fully open access, and encounter issues with using rights retention, then a preprint version of the article posted to a preprint server indexed in Europe PubMed Central before publication will be Wellcome compliant.  

If you have any queries about rights retention or your journal's policy, or if your journal refuses to allow you to apply the CC BY licence to your accepted manuscript, contact UCL's Open Access Team for advice.