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

But how can I publish open access if I have no money?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/le_haricot/347965672/



I think we can safely say now that open access has become a mainstream option for academic publishing and the Research Council UK's open access policy alongside the UK Government backed Finch Report will increase the number of open access articles and journals available. However there is only a limited amount of money and open access costs! While it is true that there are always costs to publishing it is not wholly true that to publish in an open access journal a fee has to be paid. Here are some ways to avoid fees but still be open:

1. Look through the Directory of Open Access Journals which lists over 700 open access journals in the areas of Medicine and Public Health with the majority not having any publication charges at all!

2. If you a student you can request a discount or in certain cases a complete waiver of the article processing charge from publishers such as PLoS and BioMed Central. Also remember that all staff and students from LSHTM automatically qualify for a 15% discount from BioMed Central.

3. Try e-Life the recently launched biomedical and life sciences open access journal from Wellcome Trust, Max Planck Institute and Howard Hughes Institute. Currently they have no article processing charges and welcome submissions particularly from early career researchers.

Hopefully that will help but if you need some advice just let us know.

How as a Research/PhD student do I make my own article open access?

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Take_Your_Choice_-_NARA_-_534035.jpg

As part of Open Access Week 2012 we had a drop-in session where staff and students could come and ask any questions they had about open access, publishing and/or LSHTM Research Online. One situation was presented from a PhD student who was planning a publication and wanted advice on how to make it open access. What should be simple actually reveals itself to be a careful balancing act. I've tried to list the different areas to consider when choosing a journal

1.     Choosing the journal: Many different journals to publish in and one of your first thoughts should be which journal would I like to publish in and which journal is suitable for my research. Once you have a few names then you need to find out how this journal fits with an Open Access policy

2.       Where to look:  A great place to look for specific Open Access journals is the Directory of Open Access Jounals (DOAJ) http://www.doaj.org/ this is searchable and browsable by subject area so you should be able to find a range of journals. You then need to find out if they require a fee, this information will be at the end of each listing. 

3.       Fees: Since you are a research/PhD student you probably, or lets say definitely don’t have funds to pay an open access article processing charge (APC).  So What do you do? Some journals don’t make any charge but some do. If the journal you want to publish in has a fee you should check that whether or not they have a ‘waiver’ for students, if they don’t list one you should still contact them to find out if they would consider a ‘waiver’ or if the fee can be reduced.  Publishers such as PLoS state that they will not refuse to publish and article that they have accepted due to inability to pay their fee http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/. BioMed Central state that when you submit your paper you should request a ‘waiver’ and they will consider your situation http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/apcfaq/waivers

4.       Licenses: These are important for Open Access since it allows others to be able to use your publication in various ways. The ideal license is CC-BY which is a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to reuse or redistribute your publication in any manner they see fit as long as you are credited.  Both PLoS and BioMed Central use these licenses.

5.       Deposit into an open access institutional repository such as LSHTM Research Online:  This will also make your publication open access. For many publishers such as Elsevier you can publish with them but make an earlier version, the author accepted manuscript (after peer review but without publisher pagination, typesetting) available in an institutional repository. This would mean that you would not have to make any payment. You can check what publishers/journals allow by looking on SherpaRomeo http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

6.       Contact us at researchonline@lshtm.ac.uk and we can provide more information and help on choosing a journal