Wellcome announces suite of open research measures

The global health research foundation Wellcome has announced that it will become the latest organisation to sign the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information.   

The collaboration between funders, research institutions, and infrastructure providers aims to make research-related metadata openly available and interoperable to improve transparency and efficiency of research.  

By signing the declaration, Wellcome is committing to taking a lead in transforming the way research information is used and produced – joining more than 40 other organisations. John-Arne Røttingen, Wellcome’s chief executive, made the announcement at the Metascience 2025 conference at UCL, where he underlined the importance of equity, evidence, and engagement in the science community’s self-evaluation.    

John-Arne Røttingen said: “The power of open and transparent data has tremendous potential to advance science. We are looking forward to progressing our work with organisations to make openness the default along with a fantastic community of open science advocates. Between us we can create supportive systems, sustain crucial infrastructure, and ultimately contribute to a global shift towards open science that benefits everyone.”  

OpenAlex grant  

John-Arne Røttingen also announced a new award of £2.9 million over three years to support the indexing of grants from the world’s research funders into the OpenAlex database -– a free and open database of scientific works provided by the non-profit organisation, OurResearch. The award will expand the type of data collected by the database, and help it provide links between grants and scientific works to support impact monitoring.  

“We are delighted to support OpenAlex to broaden the scope of its unique and important resource. This funding will enrich the database by indexing grants from global research funders, and provide essential links between funding and scientific output,” John-Arne Røttingen said.    

Wellcome to streamline publication tracking and progress reporting  

Additionally, Wellcome is updating the way it tracks publications relating to its own grants from autumn 2025, building on its open access policy that requires publications to be placed in the repository Europe PubMed Central. The new reporting process will point researchers to the publicly available lists of research publications associated with each grant in Europe PMC, where they can add missing publications to the open record rather than reporting them in closed system – simplifying the process for the researchers.   

This revamp is part of a larger change to how to award recipients report their progress to Wellcome during and after their grant, streamlining the existing multiple approaches into one single progress reporting process to Wellcome. Wellcome will be contacting university research offices and grant holders over the coming months with full details of these upcoming changes.    

John-Arne Røttingen also welcomed the launch of the Metascience Alliance at the conference. He said:  

“I am thrilled to see the launch of the Metascience Alliance - I am confident this will be a real force for good, and I look forward to working with this dynamic coalition in the future. Now, more than ever, collaboration within the science community is vital - we must work together to leverage our collective resources and learn from each other to strengthen research systems globally.”