PMC Canada

PubMed Central Canada is now live.

PMC Canada is a partnership between the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM)

PMC Canada is the second PMC International site to be established.

European Respiratory Journal - self-archiving option

The European Respiratory Society, publishers of the European Respiratory Journal, have confirmed that they will shortly be amending their instructions to authors to add that Wellcome Trust (or other members of the UK PMC Funders Group) will be permitted to deposit a copy of the final, peer-reviewed author-supplied manuscript (before copy-editing and publication) in PMC 6 months from publication in a print issue.

This self-archiving option is compliant with the policies of all the UKPMC Funders.

Endocrine Society's open access option

The Endocrine Society - who publish titles such as the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and Endocrinology - have developed an open access option for Wellcome Trust funded authors.

"The Endocrine Society will offer authors supported by the Wellcome Trust the option of meeting the publication requirements of the Trust by paying for an open access option. The cost to authors would be $3,000. Upon receipt of payment, the final print version will be deposited in PMC for immediate open access. These articles will be licensed using the Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-commercial license 2.0. " Further information is available from the Instruction to Author's page.

Currently this option is only available to Wellcome Trust funded researchers.

Wellcome Trust calls for greater transparency from journals on open access publishing costs

As Open Access Week 2009 gets underway, the 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 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.

Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, comments: "We are deeply committed to ensuring that research outputs are accessible to the widest possible audience. We are committing £2 million over the next year to support our researchers to make this happen and will be working closely with other funders, publishers and the research community towards this aim."

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 UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), the UK's life sciences online archive. 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 open access 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.

"We would like to see a commitment from publishers to show the uptake of their open access option and to adjust their subscription rates to reflect increases in income from open access fees," says Sir Mark. "Some publishers, for example Oxford University Press, have already done this and we would like to see all publishers behave the same way."

British Journal of Cancer -- new licence for OA content

The British Journal of Cancer - owned by Cancer Research UK (CR-UK) - has chosen to implement the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ for articles published under the BJC OPEN initiative.

This licence permits distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The licence does not permit commercial exploitation without specific permission.

This licence meets the requirements of the Wellcome Trust and the funders in the UKPMC Funders Group.

Open Access and Funder Mandates workshop

The Wellcome Trust, on behalf of the UKPMC Funders’ Group, held a workshop on the 24th Spetember, for HEI repository managers and research/open access administrators, to discuss the issues involved in ensuring that funder open access mandates are met.

The workshop was split into two sessions. The morning session focussed on the practical aspects of supporting funder mandates, including discussions around the administration and funding of author-pays charges. The afternoon session provided an opportunity for attendees to preview some of the new developments to the UKPMC service - including grant reporting functionality and the UKPMC beta website.

The overriding aim of the day was to establish a joint action plan to ensure that institutions, responsible for administering the requirements of the funder OA mandates, have the full support that they need to do the tasks involved effectively.

Workshop disucssion groups were lively and generated many ideas for actions around the main themes of monitoring compliance, messages for publishers, communicating with researchers and managing payments. These outputs will be used by the Funders' Group to produce a draft action plan - which will be circulated to delegates (and made available via this blog) by the end of October 2009.

The workshop presentations are available to view below.

UKPMC Funders' policies (Robert Kiley, Wellcome Trust)

Case study: setting up an institutional fund (Bill Hubbard, University of Nottingham)

Managing OA payments: experience from the front line (Chad Pillinger, University of Cambridge)

Defining an action plan (Nicola Perrin, Wellcome Trust)

'My UKPMC': new grant reporting services (Alison Henning, Wellcome Trust)

UK PubMed Central Overview (Paul Davey and Ernie Ong, British Library)

Publisher policies and RoMEO (Bill Hubbard, Univeristy of Nottingham)

OASPA conference

The first Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference took place in Lund between the 14-16th September 2009. The full set of presentations will be made available from the conference site within the next week or so.

Robert Kiley, from the Wellcome Trust, spoke about the Trust's open access policy, grantee compliance with the OA mandate, and what steps needed to be taken to achieve full OA for all Trust funded research papers. A copy of this presentation is provided below.

OA Wellcome Lund Sept09