CC-BY license for all Wellcome Trust funded open access articles

Since the 1st April Wellcome Trust have updated their requirements for articles published as a result of their funding. Previously Wellcome Trust allowed researchers and publishers to assign any creative commons license to an article this has now changed and the licence that must be selected is CC-BY . This license allow anyone to reuse, host, distribute, adapt the research for commercial or non-commercial use. Publishers such as PLoS, BioMed Central already apply this license. Elsevier, Wiley and Nature Publishing Group will also automatically apply this license where it is indicated that Wellcome Trust have funded the paper and an article processing charge (open access fee) is paid.

With other publishers you will need to specify to them that if an article processing charge is paid then the CC-BY license must be applied. If a publisher does not want to apply this license then no article processing fee can be paid, in such cases the publisher should instead allow the posting/deposit of the author accepted manuscript into Europe PubMed Central with an embargo date of no longer than 6 months. If the publisher cannot agree to this then the researcher should not publish with them since the article will be discounted from their list of publications to submit to Wellcome Trust and could have an impact on future funding.

Why CC-BY?

This license allows the greatest reuse of the research. Under different licenses the use of the paper or figures in a blog is not allowed since often they contain advertising, translations of papers are not allowed without further payments to publishers. CC-BY will allow the reuse and hosting of papers on blogs, enable translations and text mining. CC-BY does not affect

•  User’s fair dealing or fair use rights, or other applicable copyright exceptions and limitations
•  The author's moral rights
•   Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights

Work that is licensed CC-BY must be attributed to the author and cannot be used to endore views or opinions that the author does not support.

To check different journal positions you can look at Wellcome's list of frequently used journals

There is also now Sherpa Fact which is tool for researchers to find out whether or not a particular journal is compliant with Wellcome Trust of any other RCUK funder.

This position does not affect any articles published prior to April 1st 2013.

If you have any questions please contact Andrew Gray andrew.gray@lshtm.ac.uk