The Wellcome Trust has reportedly warned big publishers that it could refuse to provide researchers with funds to publish in certain types of their journals unless they improve their service and lower their costs. Publishers Elsevier and Wiley have been singled out as often failing to put papers in the right open access repository and appropriately attribute them with a creative commons licence.
This was a particular problem with hybrid journals, which include a combination of open access and subscription-based articles. An analysis of 2014-15 papers funded by Wellcome and five other medical research bodies found that more than half of articles published in Wiley hybrid journals were 'non-compliant' with depositing and licensing requirements. For Elsevier the non-compliance figure was 31 per cent for hybrid journals and 26 per cent for full open access. On the contrary, for PLOS, which only publishes full open access journals, all papers were compliant.
Wellcome said it had had meetings with Elsevier and Wiley to make them aware of the problem and make sure it did not continue to happen. Following this, both publishers had retrospectively put papers in the right repositories.
Overall, the funding bodies had paid publishers an article processing charge (APC) for nearly 400 articles which had not subsequently appeared in the PubMed Central (PMC) open access repository.
In addition, the Wellcome Trust found that APCs were 51 per cent more expensive in hybrid than in full open access journals. The report concludes that a number of research funders, including the Norwegian Research Council and the German Research Foundation, had stopped funding APCs for hybrid journals because of these problems.
While Wellcome has not yet resorted to such actions, it said "doing nothing is no longer a valid option". The trust will re-run a similar analysis in May, and if papers are still found to be non-compliant, the funding body has said that it will need to re-consider the ways in which they make payments for APCs.
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