The UK’s Wellcome Trust has called for greater transparency among publishers to counter the argument that access fees are being paid twice - once through subscriptions and again through publication fees. The call comes as the Trust announces a further £2 million to fund open access (OA) publication fees for its researchers over the next 12 months. The funds are part of the ongoing commitment to ensuring that the results of all Trust-funded research are made freely available online.
Since 2005, the Wellcome Trust has made it a condition of funding that researchers are required to make any Trust-funded publications available within six months through life sciences online archive, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC). The Trust will meet publication costs where the publisher agrees to make articles freely available through UKPMC at the time of publication and to license these works in a way that facilitates re-use, subject to proper attribution.
In recent months, however, concern has been expressed by the research community that publishers are using OA fees as an additional revenue stream without making a concerted effort to adapt their business models. In other words, access fees are being paid twice, through subscriptions and through publication fees.
UKPMC is currently being developed with the aim that it becomes the information resource of choice for the UK biomedical and health research communities. The development programme is managed by the British Library in consultation with UKPMC funding organisations and the academic community.
Key developments include providing the functionality - through text and data mining technologies - to integrate research articles with a range of other online sources. These include gene, protein and chemical compound databases. There is also an effort to integrate a range of bibliographic databases - including Medline, Patents and Agricola - into a single, seamless discovery tool. The new UKPMC site will go live early in 2010.
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