Wellcome Trust warns publishers over OA failings

Non-compliance with funders' requirements may see a reduction in support for hybrid journals.


Some publishers are regularly failing to comply with funders' open access (OA) requirements.  Hybrid journals (which contain a mixture of OA and subscription articles) in particular are more likely to be non-compliant.

The Wellcome Trust conducted an analysis of papers published in 2014-15 which were funded by itself and five other medical research institutions.   Together they had paid article processing charges (APC) totalling over £765,000 for almost 400 articles which had not appeared in PubMedCentral’s OA repository.  Larger publishers were singled out in the report.  Over half of the articles published by Wiley in hybrid publications were non-compliant.  The figure for Elsevier was 31%.

Some research funders including the German Research Foundation and the Norwegian Research Council have already stopped funding APCs for hybrid journals

Source and further information via Times Higher Education.