Presentation given at the RIN/RSP conference Research in the Open: how mandates work in practice on the 29th May 2009. The presentation looks at a number of funder open access mandates, with special reference to the Wellcome Trust’s policy and its implementation. The presentation also considers the author-pays model and provides data on the level of compliance with the Wellcome Trust OA mandate.

The Royal Society have announced a change in the pricing structure for its author-pays, open access model, known as EXiS Open Choice. Responding to author feedback, EXiS fees will now be based on a per-article rate, rather than a per-page rate.

Users of the UK PubMed Central Manuscript Submission System (UKMSS) are now able to use a new service – ‘My UKPMC’ – to report on the outcomes of any grant funded by any one of the UKPMC Funders’ Group member organisations.

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) – publishers of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), Molecular and Cellular Proteomics (MCP) and the Journal of Lipid Research (JLR) have announced that they will make all their content freely available through the PMC and UKPMC repositories, with a 12-month embargo.

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) – publishers of the Journal of Neuroscience – now offer a manuscript deposition service for Wellcome Trust funded researchers. Under this option, the Society will deposit the final author manuscript (i.e. the version that includes all changes that were approved following the peer review process) in UKPMC, where it will be made freely available six months after publication. No fee is charged for this service.

The American Psychological Association (APA) – publisher of titles such as Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Psychological Bulletin – have developed a Wellcome-Trust compliant author-pays model. In return for paying an OA fee ($4000) APA will deposit on behalf of the author, the final, published version directly into PMC, where it will be mirrored to UKPMC.

Research Councils UK (RCUK) have published an independent study commissioned by the Research Councils into open access to research outputs. The purpose of the study was to identify the effects and impacts of open access on publishing models and institutional repositories in light of national and international trends. This included the impact of open access on the quality and efficiency of scholarly outputs, specifically journal articles.

There is now a ’ Resources and Media ’ section on the UK PubMed Central website. So far this includes: Focus group highlights – 2 minute streaming video In late February members of the UK PubMed Central project team ran a focus group at the University of Oxford. 18 PubMed Central users attended, including researchers, technologists and librarians working within the biomedical and health communities.

Following a previous posting on the topic of JoVE, I am pleased to report that the publisher has developed a Wellcome Trust /UKPMC Funders Group-compliant, open access option.

Simply click this button to add the UKPMC search plugin to your browser search toolbar. Supported by Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7 only.

The announcement that the Journal of Visualized Experiments – JoVE – has moved from an open access model, to a subscription-based model, has attracted much comment in the blogosphere, as can be seen from the postings at the Nature Network, and the Scholarly Kitchen blogs. As a consequence of moving to a subscription service, content from JoVE at PMC and UKPMC is now embargoed for two years.