London

The Wellcome Trust's new London HQ: the charity has set out plans for open-access publishing. Credit: P. JORDAN/PA

The Wellcome Trust, Europe's largest research charity, has become the latest grant-giving body to throw down the gauntlet to academic publishers in the debate over open-access literature.

All papers reporting the results of research funded by the trust will in future have to be placed in a central public archive within six months of publication, the organization said on 4 November. The move could bring the trust into conflict with publishers, who often hold exclusive rights on the use of such material. This in turn could restrict researchers' choices about which journals they publish in.

But advocates of open access suffered a setback on 8 November when the British government rejected proposals for reforms favouring open access. The proposals had been made in July by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (see Nature 430, 390; 200410.1038/430390b).

In particular, the government rejected the committee's call that it should instruct its research councils to provide money so that scientists could meet author charges in open-access journals. “The government does not think it should intervene to support one model or another,” it said in a formal response to the committee report, adding that it was “also not convinced that the ‘author-pays’ model is inherently superior to the current model”.

But the Wellcome Trust says that it may now establish a European version of PubMed Central, a US database of biomedical research. Wellcome officials are already talking about this possibility to the US National Library of Medicine, which runs PubMed Central, but have not set a date for creating such an archive. The trust is preparing to set aside 1–2% of its total annual spend of £400 million (US$740 million) to cover the costs of the archive and of uploading papers. The version uploaded would not necessarily be the publisher's final version.

Researchers funded by Wellcome could find that the new rules create some difficult choices. Some publishing houses, such as Elsevier, which publishes more than 1,800 journals including Cell and The Lancet, do not currently allow any version of a paper they have published to be placed on a public archive other than on websites restricted to the author's research institution.

“This will put publishers and researchers in a difficult position,” acknowledges Robert Terry, a senior policy adviser at the trust's London headquarters. But Terry believes that journals will modify their policies to allow papers to go to central archives. He points out that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is considering putting similar requirements on the research that it funds (see Nature 431, 115; 200410.1038/431115a). “It would be quite a strange journal that didn't include research funded by the NIH and the Wellcome Trust,” he adds.

A spokeswoman for Elsevier said that the company was watching the NIH and Wellcome developments with interest but would not comment on possible changes to its copyright rules. Annette Thomas, managing director of Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which publishes Nature, says that important questions about the archive, such as who would take responsibility for the accuracy of the submissions, need to addressed before NPG can take a position on the plan.