Open access policy

The overarching aim of our open access (OA) policy is to ensure that knowledge and discoveries resulting from our funding are shared and used in a way that maximises their benefit to health. The policy applies to original published research, research articles, monographs and book chapters.

All publications that report original research, which has been supported in whole, or in part, by Wellcome must:

• be made freely available from Europe PubMed Central upon publication
• be under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, or a CC-BY-ND licence by exception
• include a data availability statement, in line with our data, software and materials management and sharing policy.

See below for monographs and book chapter exceptions.

Researchers or their employing organisation should ensure they have retained sufficient rights over their research outputs to comply with the policy requirements.

To comply with the policy, researchers must ensure that a version of the research publication is available within Europe PMC under a CC BY licence. This could be:

• the Version of Record, or
• the Author Accepted Manuscript

If you are unable to make the Version of Record or the Author Accepted Manuscript open access, then you may post a preprint under a CC BY licence. We will accept this as compliant with the policy in these situations. 

Exceptions for scholarly monographs and book chapters:

• Content may be embargoed for up to 6 months from the official final publication date prior to release in Europe PMC.
• Where an open access fee is paid, researchers can choose the Creative Commons licence the work is published under. Our preference is for CC BY.

Grantholders should read our complying with our open access policy page for detailed guidance on how to ensure their published research complies with our policy.

We will fund reasonable article processing charges for research articles published in (i) fully open access journals/platforms or (ii) until the end of 2024, research papers published in journals that have transformative journal status.

We also provide funds to support open access fees for monographs and book chapters.

We will provide supplementary funding for eligible open access publishing costs.

See open access funding for more information.

All Wellcome-funded researchers are strongly encouraged to post preprints of their work under a CC BY licence to facilitate the dissemination of results and, at times, open access compliance.

Where there is a significant public health benefit to preprints being shared widely and rapidly, such as a disease outbreak, Wellcome requires the posting of preprints.

• Complying with our open access policy
• Data, software and materials management and sharing policy
• Open access funding

Updated January 2024