CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: plan s rights retention

  • NIHR Open Access Policy 2026: What’s Required and What’s Under Review

    The NIHR open access policy requires that peer-reviewed research articles funded in whole or in part by the National Institute for Health and Care Research be made freely available immediately on publication, deposited in Europe PMC, and published under a CC BY licence. The policy took effect for articles submitted on or after 1 June 2022. NIHR has since reviewed the policy to confirm it remains fit for purpose across its portfolio, and the review process — not just the original mandate — is what research offices now need to track.

    The NIHR open access policy is the set of rules issued by the National Institute for Health and Care Research requiring that research articles it funds be published with no access barrier and no embargo, on terms that permit free reuse. It sits alongside, but is not identical to, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) open access policy and the Wellcome open access policy — three UK funder mandates that are frequently confused with one another despite meaningful differences in scope, deposit routes and licensing flexibility.

    What does the NIHR open access policy actually require?

    NIHR’s policy applies to peer-reviewed research articles — including unsolicited reviews and conference papers — funded wholly or partly through NIHR Programmes, Personal Awards, or Infrastructure. Monographs, book chapters and edited collections fall outside scope. For any in-scope article submitted on or after 1 June 2022, NIHR’s own compliance form confirms the article must be deposited in Europe PMC and made immediately, permanently available with no embargo period.

    Three conditions apply together, not as alternatives:

    • Immediate deposit. The version of record or the author’s accepted manuscript must appear in Europe PMC on the day of formal publication — there is no allowance for a delayed or embargoed release.
    • CC BY licensing. Articles must carry a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, permitting reuse and adaptation — including commercial reuse — provided the original authors are credited. A more restrictive CC BY-ND (no-derivatives) licence is permitted only with prior NIHR approval, and Crown Copyright outputs instead use the Open Government Licence.
    • Data access statement. Every publication must state how the underlying research data can be accessed, or explain clearly why access is restricted (for example, patient confidentiality or commercial sensitivity).

    Authors submitting to a subscription journal without a compliant route must also include a rights-retention statement in the funding acknowledgement and cover letter, asserting the right to deposit the accepted manuscript under CC BY regardless of the publisher’s standard licence terms.

    What is the NIHR Open Access policy review?

    Separately from the 2022 mandate itself, NIHR maintains an active Open Access policy review — a standing process to check the policy is “fit for the future” across the full breadth of NIHR’s research portfolio, which spans clinical trials, applied health research, infrastructure awards and early-career fellowships with very different publication norms. NIHR has stated that public feedback directly informed revisions to the published policy, indicating the review is a live governance mechanism rather than a one-off launch document.

    For research offices, this distinction matters. A policy under active review can change scope, licensing exceptions, or compliance deadlines with comparatively short notice — unlike a funder mandate that has been static for several years. Institutions that treat the 2022 text as permanently fixed risk missing amendments that emerge from the review cycle.

    How does NIHR’s policy compare with UKRI and Wellcome?

    NIHR, UKRI and Wellcome each mandate immediate open access with a CC BY licence as the default, but they diverge on effective dates, scope and flexibility. This is the single most common point of confusion for multi-funder research offices.

    Funder Effective date (journal articles) Deposit location Default licence Notable flexibility
    NIHR 1 June 2022 (in-scope submissions) Europe PMC CC BY (CC BY-ND with approval) Dedicated open access funding envelope for eligible awards; policy under ongoing review
    UKRI 1 April 2022 (journal articles); 1 January 2024 (monographs, book chapters, edited collections) Europe PMC or an institutional/subject repository CC BY (CC BY-ND permitted in limited cases) Phased rollout separating journal articles from long-form outputs
    Wellcome 1 January 2021 Europe PMC CC BY (no CC BY-ND route) No embargo tolerance; preprint deposit actively encouraged alongside the final article

    The practical effect: an NIHR- and UKRI-co-funded article must satisfy the earlier of the two applicable deadlines and the stricter of the two licensing conditions, while a Wellcome co-funded article has no CC BY-ND fallback at all. Research administrators managing co-funded grants should map compliance against the strictest funder in the mix, not the most familiar one.

    Gold or Green: which route applies to a given article?

    NIHR compliance runs through two established routes, mirroring the language UKRI and Wellcome also use.

    • Gold route. Publish in a fully open access journal, or a hybrid journal covered by a transformative agreement. NIHR funds reasonable article processing charges (APCs) for eligible awards through a dedicated open access funding line.
    • Green route. Publish in a subscription journal without a transformative agreement, and instead deposit the author’s accepted manuscript in Europe PMC under CC BY, supported by the rights-retention statement in the funding acknowledgement.

    Both routes must still meet the no-embargo requirement — the green route in NIHR’s case does not permit the delayed deposit windows still found in some non-UK funder mandates.

    Common questions about the NIHR policy

    Does the NIHR open access policy require immediate deposit?

    Yes. The NIHR open access policy requires the final article or accepted manuscript to be deposited in Europe PMC and made freely available on the day of publication, with no embargo period permitted under any compliance route.

    What licence does NIHR require for funded research articles?

    NIHR requires a CC BY licence by default, allowing free reuse and adaptation with attribution. A CC BY-ND licence is permitted only with prior NIHR approval, and Crown Copyright outputs instead carry the Open Government Licence.

    Is the NIHR open access policy the same as UKRI’s?

    No. Both require CC BY and Europe PMC deposit, but UKRI’s journal-article requirement took effect on 1 April 2022, two months before NIHR’s 1 June 2022 start date, and UKRI’s policy separately phases in monograph coverage from 2024.

    Why is NIHR reviewing its open access policy?

    NIHR states the review exists to keep the policy fit for the future across a portfolio that spans clinical trials, infrastructure and fellowship awards, and confirms that public feedback has already shaped revisions to the published text.

    What this means for institutions and researchers

    Research offices supporting multi-funder grants should build compliance checks around the strictest applicable deadline and licence condition, rather than defaulting to whichever funder’s policy staff know best. Because NIHR’s policy sits inside an active review cycle, institutional guidance pages should be dated and re-checked against NIHR’s own policy page at each funding cycle, rather than treated as a fixed reference. Authors submitting to subscription journals should confirm the rights-retention statement is included at submission, not added retrospectively, since post-hoc requests are harder for publishers to honour.

    Looking ahead, the continued existence of a formal review mechanism signals that NIHR intends its open access requirements to keep pace with sector-wide developments — including alignment pressure from UKRI, cOAlition S signatories and Wellcome — rather than remain static. Institutions that monitor the review outputs alongside the base policy will be better placed to anticipate the next compliance change rather than react to it after a grant has already been awarded.

    For related compliance context, see CASRAI’s research administration resources and the open-access terminology entries in the CASRAI Dictionary.

  • Open Policy Finder: The Sherpa Romeo Successor

    Open Policy Finder is Jisc’s consolidated platform for checking publisher self-archiving rules and funder open-access requirements. It replaced Sherpa Romeo, Sherpa Juliet and Sherpa Fact with a single search interface in 2024, and it is now the standard first stop for research administrators running Plan S or rights-retention compliance checks. Search one journal or publisher and see accepted-manuscript deposit rules, embargo periods and funder mandates together, rather than cross-checking three separate Sherpa tools.

    Open Policy Finder is a free, Jisc-managed database that standardises open-access self-archiving and funder-policy information for thousands of publishers and major funders worldwide, built on the data and legacy of the Sherpa services founded in 2006 at the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Research Communications.

    What is Open Policy Finder?

    Open Policy Finder is an online platform, managed by Jisc, that aggregates and standardises open-access policies for publishers, journals, books and funders into one searchable index. It answers the question research administrators ask most often: which version of a manuscript — submitted, accepted or published — can be deposited in a repository, and after how long an embargo.

    The service traces its lineage to Sherpa Romeo, founded in 2006 at the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Research Communications and later transferred to Jisc. Rather than running Romeo, Juliet and Fact as three separate lookups, Jisc rebuilt them as one platform, launched under the Open Policy Finder name. Sherpa Romeo as a standalone service no longer exists; its URL now redirects to openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk.

    According to Jisc’s published service profile, Open Policy Finder currently holds data on 3,503 global publisher open-access policies, including 28,000 journal-level policies, plus 178 major global funders’ open-access requirements. Its companion directory, OpenDOAR, separately tracks 5,868 institutional repositories worldwide, supporting global harvesting and aggregation of deposited outputs.

    How does Open Policy Finder differ from Sherpa Romeo?

    The core content is inherited from Sherpa Romeo, but the presentation and scope have changed substantially. Romeo was known for a colour-coded traffic-light system (green, blue, yellow, white) requiring a key to interpret; Open Policy Finder replaces this with plain-language labels — “Published,” “Accepted” and “Submitted” — describing which manuscript version a policy applies to, without needing a legend.

    Three previously separate Sherpa services are now unified behind one search box:

    • Sherpa Romeo’s publisher and journal self-archiving policies
    • Sherpa Juliet’s funder open-access policy summaries
    • Sherpa Fact’s journal-versus-funder compliance checking

    Open Policy Finder also extends coverage beyond what Romeo offered: it now includes open-access book policies searchable by publisher, and a dedicated Transitional Agreement look-up showing which “read and publish” or “publish and read” deals an institution holds and which journals they cover. Neither feature existed in the legacy Sherpa Romeo interface.

    How does it fit a Plan S / rights-retention compliance workflow?

    cOAlition S, the funder consortium behind Plan S, requires that funded research be made immediately open access on publication, either via a compliant journal/platform route or via self-archiving of the accepted manuscript under an open licence. Since 2021, cOAlition S funders and UKRI have applied a Rights Retention Strategy (RRS): authors declare, at submission, that any resulting accepted manuscript carries a CC BY licence, regardless of the publisher’s own self-archiving terms.

    This is precisely where Open Policy Finder earns its place in a compliance workflow. A research administrator checking whether a submission will satisfy a funder’s Plan S obligations needs three facts at once: the journal’s standard embargo, whether the publisher accepts a rights-retention statement or CC BY licence on the accepted manuscript, and whether the funder’s own policy overrides the journal default. Open Policy Finder’s unified record — journal policy plus funder policy in one view — replaces what used to require cross-referencing Sherpa Romeo and Sherpa Juliet separately, then manually checking Sherpa Fact for the funder-journal match.

    A practical compliance check typically runs as follows:

    1. Search the target journal or publisher in Open Policy Finder.
    2. Check the accepted-manuscript (“Accepted”) deposit terms and embargo length.
    3. Cross-reference the relevant funder’s policy (for example, a cOAlition S member or UKRI) shown in the same record.
    4. Check the Transitional Agreement look-up if the institution holds a read-and-publish deal with that publisher.
    5. Record the compliant route (repository deposit, RRS declaration, or agreement-covered gold OA) before submission, not after acceptance.

    What data and features does the platform cover?

    The table below summarises what changed between the legacy Sherpa suite and the current Open Policy Finder platform.

    Feature Legacy Sherpa suite (pre-2024) Open Policy Finder (current)
    Publisher/journal self-archiving policies Sherpa Romeo, colour-coded Included, plain-language labels
    Funder open-access policies Sherpa Juliet, separate search Included in the same record
    Funder–journal compliance check Sherpa Fact, separate tool Built into the unified search
    Open-access book policies Not covered Searchable by publisher
    Transitional Agreement look-up Not available Dedicated look-up tool
    Publisher policies indexed ~2,500 (Romeo, historic) 3,503, including 28,000 journal-level policies
    Funders indexed Fewer, via Juliet 178 major global funders
    Access model Free, web UI Free, web UI plus open API

    All Open Policy Finder data is published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA for most content), and the underlying dataset remains free to query via its open API — a design choice that lets institutional repository systems and compliance dashboards pull policy data directly rather than screen-scraping.

    Frequently asked questions

    How do I find open access journals?

    Search the journal or publisher name directly in Open Policy Finder to see its self-archiving and open-access route. For fully open-access titles specifically, cross-check the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which indexes journals that publish exclusively OA under a peer-reviewed quality standard.

    What is an open access policy?

    An open-access policy is a publisher’s or funder’s stated rule on how and when a research output may be made freely available — covering which manuscript version can be deposited, any embargo period, and licensing terms. Open Policy Finder standardises these policies into one comparable format across publishers and funders.

    Is Sherpa Romeo still available?

    No. Sherpa Romeo was retired as a standalone service when Jisc consolidated it with Sherpa Juliet and Sherpa Fact into Open Policy Finder in 2024. Its former web address now redirects to the new platform, and all of its publisher policy data has been migrated and is actively maintained there.

    Do I have to pay for open access?

    Not always. Many journals offer a free, no-cost “green” self-archiving route — depositing the accepted manuscript in a repository after an embargo — alongside a paid “gold” article processing charge (APC) route for immediate open publication. Open Policy Finder shows both routes, plus any Transitional Agreement that may waive the APC.

    What this means for research administrators

    For institutions running Plan S, UKRI or REF-linked open-access compliance checks, the consolidation into Open Policy Finder removes a genuine workflow inefficiency: three separate Sherpa look-ups have become one. Research administrators building institutional compliance guidance, submission checklists, or automated repository-deposit reminders should update internal documentation and any embedded links that still reference “Sherpa Romeo,” since the standalone service is discontinued.

    The open API is the detail most compliance teams should act on now. Because policy data can be queried programmatically, institutional repository platforms and CRIS systems can surface a journal’s current self-archiving terms directly inside the deposit workflow, rather than requiring staff to check a separate website — reducing the single biggest source of missed Plan S embargo deadlines: manual, one-off policy lookups that go stale between check and submission.

    As transitional agreements expand and funder rights-retention policies mature, expect Open Policy Finder’s funder-policy and Transitional Agreement data to become the reference layer that institutional research-administration systems query by default, in the way Sherpa Romeo’s colour codes once were for a previous generation of repository managers.

  • Plan S Green Open Access: Zero-Embargo Deposit Rules

    Plan S green open access is the compliance route that lets a researcher publish in the journal of their choice — including a subscription journal — and still meet their funder’s open access mandate, provided the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) or Version of Record (VoR) is deposited in a qualifying repository immediately on publication, with no embargo period and under a CC BY licence.

    Green open access is repository-based open access: the author (or their institution) self-archives a copy of the peer-reviewed article in an online repository, independently of whatever access model the publishing journal itself uses. Under cOAlition S’s implementation guidance, this route is one of three recognised paths to Plan S compliance, alongside publishing in a fully open access journal/platform and publishing under a transformative arrangement.

    What is green open access under Plan S?

    Green open access under Plan S is the “repository route” to compliance: a researcher publishes in a subscription journal and separately makes a copy freely available in an Open Access repository. It requires no article processing charge (APC), and does not depend on the publisher’s own access model — why research offices generally advise it as the lowest-cost compliance path.

    cOAlition S’s Principles and Implementation guidance states: “all scholarly articles that result from research funded by members of cOAlition S must be openly available immediately upon publication without any embargo period.” The green route is one of three ways to satisfy this.

    What are the zero-embargo deposit rules?

    The defining feature of Plan S green open access is that no embargo period is permitted — not the traditional 6- or 12-month delay still common elsewhere. Deposit and public availability must coincide with the publication date, including for early-view versions published online ahead of an issue.

    • Version deposited: either the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (the peer-reviewed, post-review text before publisher copy-editing and typesetting) or the Version of Record, at the publisher’s discretion.
    • Timing: immediate — deposit “no later than” publication date; retrospective or embargoed deposit does not satisfy Plan S.
    • Licence: the deposited copy must carry a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 licence by default. cOAlition S accepts CC BY-SA 4.0 or CC0 as secondary alternatives, and will approve CC BY-ND only where a grantee explicitly requests and justifies it.
    • Rights basis: the author or their institution must retain sufficient rights — via copyright retention or a compliant licence to publish — to authorise the deposit themselves, rather than relying on publisher permission after the fact.

    This zero-embargo condition is what separates Plan S green OA from “traditional” green OA policies used by many institutional mandates (e.g. REF-linked UK policies), which commonly tolerate a delay before the AAM is made public.

    Which repositories qualify?

    Plan S does not publish a fixed whitelist of approved repositories. Instead, cOAlition S sets published technical criteria that any repository — institutional, subject-based, or general-purpose — must meet, and expects the repository to be listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) or in the process of registering.

    Under Part III of cOAlition S’s technical guidance, mandatory repository criteria include:

    • Persistent identifiers (PIDs) for deposited versions, such as a DOI.
    • High-quality, interoperable article-level metadata released under a CC0 public domain dedication, including complete funder and grant-number information.
    • Machine-readable open access status and licence information embedded in the article record.
    • Continuous availability, with uptime of at least 99.7% (excluding scheduled maintenance).
    • A functioning helpdesk — at minimum an email address — with a response time of no more than one business day.

    In practice, this means most well-run institutional repositories qualify, alongside subject repositories such as PubMed Central and Europe PMC for the life sciences, and general-purpose repositories such as Zenodo (which is itself referenced elsewhere in cOAlition S’s own guidance materials). Research offices should verify a specific repository’s registration status directly via OpenDOAR rather than assuming compliance from reputation alone.

    How does the green route differ from the Rights Retention Strategy?

    The green route and the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) are related but distinct mechanisms, and conflating them is a common source of confusion in author-facing guidance. The green route is the compliance pathway — publish anywhere, deposit with zero embargo. RRS is the legal mechanism cOAlition S introduced to make that pathway enforceable even when a publisher’s standard licence-to-publish would otherwise block it.

    Under RRS, an author applies a CC BY licence to their AAM at the point of submission — before any publishing agreement is signed — via a standard rights-retention statement in the manuscript or cover letter. This pre-empts publisher terms that would otherwise impose an embargo, because the author’s declaration takes precedence. RRS is the tool that keeps zero-embargo green deposit available even in journals with no proactive compliant route.

    How does green compare with gold and hybrid (APC) routes?

    Gold open access means publishing directly in a fully open access journal or platform, where the article is freely available from the publisher at the point of publication — usually funded by an APC, which cOAlition S members will financially support. Hybrid — publishing open access within an otherwise subscription journal — is explicitly not supported by cOAlition S funding except within pre-approved transformative arrangements.

    Dimension Green (zero-embargo repository) Gold / OA journal Rights Retention Strategy
    Where you publish Any subscription journal Fully open access journal/platform Any journal (RRS is a licensing overlay, not a venue choice)
    Typical cost to author/funder No APC APC, funder-supported No APC
    Embargo permitted None None (immediate by definition) None
    Version deposited/published AAM or VoR, in a repository VoR, on publisher platform AAM, in a repository, licensed at submission
    Licence CC BY (default) CC BY (default) CC BY, asserted before any publisher agreement

    For research-office staff advising authors, the practical guidance is: green zero-embargo deposit is generally the cheapest compliant route, RRS is the safeguard that keeps it available when a publisher resists, and gold/APC remains appropriate where funder policy or discipline norms favour immediate publisher-side open access.

    Frequently asked questions

    What does green open access mean?

    Green open access means self-archiving a copy of a peer-reviewed article in an online repository — institutional, subject-based, or general-purpose — independently of the journal’s own access model. The author retains the ability to publish in any journal, including subscription titles, while separately making a version openly available at no cost to readers.

    What is the difference between gold and green open access?

    Gold open access means the publisher itself makes the article freely available immediately, typically funded by an APC. Green open access means the author self-archives a copy in a repository, which can apply even when the journal itself remains subscription-based, and normally carries no publication fee.

    Is green open access free?

    Yes. The green route generally involves no article processing charge to the author, funder, or institution. The only ongoing costs are the repository’s own infrastructure, which is typically funded institutionally rather than per-deposit, making green the lowest-cost Plan S compliance path for most authors.

    What is Plan S in open access?

    Plan S is an open access policy initiative launched by cOAlition S in September 2018, requiring that scholarly publications from research funded by its members be made immediately and openly available, with effect from 2021, via open access journals, platforms, or zero-embargo repository deposit.

    What this means for research offices

    Advising authors correctly requires distinguishing three separate questions: is the venue itself compliant (checked via cOAlition S’s Journal Checker Tool), does the author need Rights Retention to secure deposit rights, and is the target repository actually OpenDOAR-registered and criteria-compliant. Treating these as one question is the most common cause of authors believing they have complied when they have not — and it should be confirmed at submission, not after acceptance, since retrofitting a CC BY declaration onto a signed publisher agreement is frequently unenforceable.

    Outlook

    cOAlition S committed to a formal review of Plan S’s requirements, including the role of repository-based compliance, with several “strongly recommended” repository criteria (such as JATS XML full text and open citation data) flagged for possible upgrade to mandatory status. Research offices should expect repository technical requirements to tighten rather than relax, making early alignment with OpenDOAR criteria and RRS-based submission workflows a durable investment. For institutions building broader compliance workflows, see CASRAI’s research administration resources.

  • Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy Explained: Requirements, APC Funding and the Plan S Link

    Wellcome Trust’s open access policy requires that original research articles arising, in whole or in part, from Wellcome funding be made freely available in Europe PMC immediately on publication, licensed CC BY, with no embargo permitted — a rule that has applied to all qualifying submissions since 1 January 2021 and is backed by direct grant-linked funding for publication costs.

    The Wellcome Trust open access policy is the funder’s mandatory requirement that peer-reviewed research articles, monographs and book chapters supported by its grants be deposited in Europe PMC (and NCBI Bookshelf, for long-form works) and openly licensed at the point of publication, with compliance routes and funding administered directly by Wellcome rather than through a separate national mandate.

    What Wellcome’s open access policy requires

    Wellcome’s current policy took effect for articles submitted from 1 January 2021. It applies to all original peer-reviewed research articles supported wholly or partly by Wellcome funding, and requires immediate, unembargoed open access with a CC BY licence (CC BY-ND only by case-by-case exception, requested before submission).

    Three routes satisfy the policy:

    • Gold route — publish in a fully open access journal or platform; the publisher deposits the version of record in PubMed Central and Europe PMC.
    • Green route — publish in a subscription journal and make the author accepted manuscript (AAM) open in Europe PMC immediately, under CC BY, via Wellcome’s rights retention clause.
    • Transformative-agreement route — publish through an institutional transformative agreement that makes the version of record open access.

    Scholarly monographs and book chapters carry a separate provision: they may be deposited up to six months after publication and are not required to use CC BY if another Creative Commons licence is more appropriate.

    How Wellcome funds APC and open access costs

    Wellcome funds open access directly rather than relying solely on national block-grant schemes. In the 2021/22 grant year, Wellcome awarded £7.2 million in open access block grants to 38 institutions, and 92% of individually reported articles complied with the policy, according to Wellcome’s own published guidance.

    The funding rules tightened materially from 1 January 2025: Wellcome now funds article processing charges only for research articles published in fully open access journals or platforms. Hybrid (“paywall-plus-OA-option”) subscription journals are no longer eligible for Wellcome APC funding, even where an institution holds a transformative agreement with the publisher — a stricter position than Wellcome held during 2021–2024, when transformative-agreement “publish” fees were still fundable.

    This mirrors the broader Plan S trajectory away from hybrid subsidy, but Wellcome reached the fully-OA-only funding line on its own timetable, separate from any coalition-wide deadline.

    Rights retention: the automatic CC BY clause

    Wellcome’s rights retention mechanism is built into its grant conditions rather than delivered through a separate author addendum. Since 1 January 2021, Wellcome grant terms automatically apply a CC BY licence to the author accepted manuscript of any original research article the grant supports, in whole or in part — meaning the author retains sufficient rights to make the AAM open immediately, regardless of a publisher’s default embargo.

    This differs in mechanism, though not in intent, from UKRI’s parallel approach. UKRI’s own open access policy, which took effect for journal articles submitted from 1 April 2022, established a comparable zero-embargo, CC BY-on-AAM route roughly fifteen months after Wellcome’s clause had already been in force.

    Funder Zero-embargo Green route Automatic CC BY on AAM effective from cOAlition S / Plan S status
    Wellcome Trust Yes 1 January 2021 Founding member
    UKRI Yes 1 April 2022 Founding member
    cOAlition S baseline (Plan S) Required for Green route Recommended coalition-wide via the Rights Retention Strategy Coalition framework itself

    Where an author cannot secure rights retention on the AAM and the article is not published Gold, several UK institutions — including UCL — accept a CC BY-licensed preprint deposited in a Europe PMC-indexed preprint server before publication as an alternative compliance path.

    Wellcome is a founding member of cOAlition S, the funder consortium that launched Plan S in September 2018 alongside Science Europe and the European Commission, and that now counts roughly two dozen funder organisations among its members. Wellcome’s current policy is deliberately aligned with Plan S’s core principles: immediate access, open licensing, and author choice of venue.

    But the relationship runs the other way chronologically. Wellcome introduced one of the world’s first funder open access mandates in 2006 — over a decade before Plan S existed — requiring deposit of funded research in PubMed Central. The 2021 policy update did not create Wellcome’s open access commitment; it tightened an existing mandate (removing the embargo Wellcome had previously permitted) specifically to bring it into line with Plan S’s stricter, zero-embargo standard. Wellcome-funded researchers can check which compliance route a given journal supports using the Journal Checker Tool, built jointly by cOAlition S and its funder members.

    Common questions about Wellcome’s policy

    Does Wellcome Trust pay for open access publishing?

    Yes. Wellcome funds APCs directly for articles in fully open access journals and platforms, distributes annual open access block grants to grant-holding institutions, and separately funds compliant open access publication of monographs and book chapters on request.

    What licence does Wellcome require for open access articles?

    CC BY is the default requirement for all research articles made open under the policy. A more restrictive CC BY-ND licence is permitted only by prior, case-by-case exception, requested through Wellcome’s dedicated request form before submission.

    Is Wellcome Trust part of Plan S?

    Yes. Wellcome is a founding member of cOAlition S, the funder coalition behind Plan S. Its own open access policy is fully aligned with Plan S principles, though Wellcome’s underlying open access mandate predates Plan S by more than ten years.

    What happens if a Wellcome-funded paper doesn’t comply?

    Non-compliant articles are not automatically penalised per se, but Wellcome tracks compliance rates at institutional level, ties future open access block grant funding to institutional performance, and expects grant-holding organisations to actively support researchers in meeting the policy’s routes.

    Implications for institutions and researchers

    For research administrators managing Wellcome grant portfolios, the practical shift is the narrowing of fundable routes since January 2025: budgeting for hybrid-journal APCs against Wellcome funds is no longer viable outside a qualifying transformative agreement’s non-hybrid terms, so pre-submission journal checking has become a compliance necessity rather than a courtesy.

    Researchers publishing in subscription journals should treat rights retention as the default fallback, since it requires no publisher fee and no embargo negotiation — the CC BY licence on the accepted manuscript is already secured by the grant terms before the paper is ever submitted.

    Outlook

    Wellcome’s trajectory — mandate first, coalition alignment second, funding restriction third — has become a template other funders are following at their own pace. As UKRI, NIHR and other cOAlition S members continue tightening hybrid-journal funding eligibility, institutions that already built Wellcome-compliant workflows around zero-embargo Green routes are better placed to absorb the next round of funder-specific restrictions.