Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK (CRUK) are both major UK charitable research funders, but their grant governance rules diverge sharply: Wellcome funds open-access (OA) publishing costs only in fully open-access venues, while CRUK stopped funding OA publishing costs entirely from 1 October 2026, pushing researchers toward the green (repository) route instead. Reporting cadences and data-sharing expectations also differ in structure, though both track outputs through Researchfish.
A wellcome trust grants award and a CRUK award are governed by two separate rulebooks, and institutions holding both must satisfy each on its own terms rather than assuming a single compliance workflow covers both funders.
- Overview: two funders, two rulebooks
- What open access rules apply to Wellcome and CRUK grants?
- How do data sharing requirements differ?
- What are the reporting deadlines and systems?
- Side-by-side comparison
- Answer-first Q&A
- Implications for research administrators
Overview: two funders, two rulebooks
Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation established in 1936 that funds biomedical and health research; Cancer Research UK is a charity dedicated exclusively to cancer research, prevention and treatment. Both sit outside UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and therefore set their own grant conditions rather than following the UKRI open access policy by default.
Institutions that hold grants from both — a common scenario in UK medical schools and cancer centres — cannot treat “funder compliance” as a single checklist. Wellcome and CRUK differ on when open access funding is available, how data-sharing plans are assessed, and which portal is used for annual reporting.
What open access rules apply to Wellcome and CRUK grants?
Wellcome’s open access policy, updated 2 January 2025, applies to all original research articles submitted for publication after 1 January 2021. It requires immediate deposit in Europe PMC under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, with a CC BY-ND exception available only case-by-case. Since 1 January 2025, Wellcome funds article processing charges (APCs) only for publication in fully open-access journals or platforms — it no longer supports hybrid-journal APCs.
CRUK’s position has since moved further away from direct OA funding. In a policy update announced 1 April 2026, CRUK confirmed it will no longer provide financial support for open access publishing costs from 1 October 2026, citing a projected saving of £5.2 million over three years. CRUK-funded researchers are instead directed to the green route: depositing the author-accepted manuscript in a repository such as Europe PMC within six months of publication, under a CC BY 4.0 licence for the deposited version.
- Wellcome: gold/fully-OA route funded via block grants and Wellcome Open Research; CC BY required; immediate deposit.
- CRUK: green route only from October 2026; no institutional block grant or underspend funding for APCs; six-month embargo permitted on the deposited manuscript.
How do data sharing requirements differ?
Both funders require a data-sharing plan at application stage, but they weight it differently in the funding decision. Wellcome asks applicants for an outputs management plan covering data, software and materials, and expects data underpinning a publication to be available at the time that publication appears, with fewer restrictions where possible; data related to public health emergencies must be shared on an accelerated timeline.
CRUK requires a data management and sharing plan as a scored component of the application review itself, with a stated expectation that data be released no later than acceptance of the paper reporting the main findings. Both funders require consent documentation that anticipates future data sharing, reflecting alignment with FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles used across UK biomedical funding.
What are the reporting deadlines and systems?
Wellcome grantholders submit annual progress reports through the Wellcome Funding platform, plus end-of-grant reports; for award types ending on or before September 2026, end-of-grant reporting runs through Researchfish. Wellcome also requires separate annual reporting on intellectual property and commercialisation activity where relevant.
CRUK manages grant applications and administration through its Flexi-Grant portal — the same underlying system used by several other UK funders, including the Royal Society and the British Academy — and uses Researchfish for annual output reporting. CRUK-funded researchers must submit a Researchfish return every year the award is active and for three consecutive years after the award ends, a longer post-award tail than Wellcome applies to most schemes. Missing a submission window can affect eligibility for future funding from either organisation.
Side-by-side comparison
| Governance area | Wellcome Trust | Cancer Research UK |
|---|---|---|
| Open access funding | Funds APCs in fully open-access venues only (since 1 Jan 2025) | No OA funding of any kind from 1 Oct 2026 |
| Default compliance route | Gold/fully-OA, immediate deposit | Green route, 6-month embargo permitted |
| Required licence | CC BY (CC BY-ND by exception) | CC BY 4.0 on deposited manuscript |
| Data plan required at | Application (outputs management plan) | Application (scored data management & sharing plan) |
| Grant admin portal | Wellcome Funding platform | Flexi-Grant |
| Output reporting system | Researchfish (most schemes, to Sept 2026) | Researchfish, annually + 3 years post-award |
Answer-first Q&A
Where does Wellcome Trust funding come from?
Wellcome Trust’s endowment originates from the estate of pharmaceutical entrepreneur Sir Henry Wellcome, built on the Burroughs Wellcome (later Wellcome Foundation) pharmaceutical business. The Trust sold its remaining stake in Wellcome plc to the public in the 1990s and now funds research from investment income on that endowment, independent of government or industry grants.
How do I contact Wellcome Trust about funding?
Funding-specific queries should go to [email protected], the address Wellcome designates for applicant and grantholder questions. General enquiries route through Wellcome’s main contact channels, but funding support has its own dedicated inbox to keep response times predictable for active applicants.
Who is eligible for a Wellcome Career Development Award?
A Wellcome Career Development Award targets mid-career researchers ready to lead a substantial, innovative research programme. Applicants must demonstrate they can generate a significant shift in understanding within their field and typically need an existing track record of independent or semi-independent research output.
Implications for research administrators
Institutions running co-funded projects — for example, a cancer biology programme with both Wellcome and CRUK support — need two separate compliance calendars, not one. The CRUK OA funding withdrawal effective October 2026 shifts real cost onto institutional library budgets or block grants for any CRUK-funded output that cannot clear a six-month green embargo, while Wellcome retains a funded gold-OA pathway. Research offices should map which grants sit under which policy before setting a single “institutional OA workflow,” since applying Wellcome’s rules to a CRUK-funded paper — or vice versa — risks a compliance breach that is grounds for withholding future funding.
Reporting also needs separate tracking: CRUK’s three-year post-award Researchfish tail outlasts most Wellcome end-of-grant obligations, so a grant closed on paper may still carry an active reporting duty. Building funder-specific reminders into grants-management systems — rather than a single generic “reporting due” flag — is the practical safeguard against missed submissions and the funding-eligibility penalties both organisations attach to them.
