The document summarizes the Wellcome Trust's experience with an author-pays open access model. It finds that around 50% of Wellcome Trust-funded papers comply with its open access policy, with 33% being immediately open access. A study of 460 open access papers published in the last quarter of 2010 found an average author-pays fee of $2,367, with a total estimated cost to the Trust of $1.04 million. Extrapolating to the Trust's total annual research output, open access fees were estimated to represent around 1.25% of total research spending. The document concludes there is growing momentum and funding support for open access publishing.

1. Wellcome Trust and open access: experience with author-pays model ASA Conference 21 st February 2011 Robert Kiley, Head Digital Services, Wellcome Library, Wellcome Trust (r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk)

4. OA at the Wellcome Trust: policy All research papers – funded in whole or in part by the Wellcome Trust – must be made freely accessible from the PubMed Central and UKPMC repositories as soon as possible, and in any event within six months of the journal publisher’s official date of final publication

9. Fact extraction from text mining Questions generated in response to query

14. Baseline numbers 188 Total number of unique journals 33% “ Immediate compliance” [This is lower than the 50% figure, as this study is looking at papers with a zero month embargo. This figure suggests that about 66% of Wellcome papers that adhere with mandate are made freely available at the time of publication ] 42 Total number of unique publishers 460 Total number of these papers already available in UKPMC (in January 2011) 1413 Total number of papers in PubMed, attributed to Wellcome Trust funding (Oct 1 st 2010 – Dec 31 st 2010)

15. Where was this research published: full OA journal, hybrid journal or other? N=460

16. Most used publishers (with OA option ) Top 10 publishers (by volume) constitute 83% of the Wellcome Trust output “ Other” constitutes 32 other publishers

17. Most used journals (with an OA option) Top 10 journals (by volume) constitute 43% of the Wellcome Trust output Hybrid titles

18. Author–pays: costs $3,000 Mode (excl. VAT) $2,250 Median (excl. VAT) $2,367 Average cost per paper (excl. VAT) $1,041,645 Total spend of APC’s for these 440 articles (excl. VAT) 440/460 (95%) Total number of articles in cohort that attracted an author-side payment

19. Distribution of costs

20. Author–pays costs: extrapolated total costs for Wellcome Trust Note: These figures assumes all journals offer an OA option, that this option is used by the author, and Wellcome picks up 100% of costs, even when other funders support the research. 1.25% % spend on OA costs as ratio of total research spend $945m Trust research spend in 09-10 (£586m) $11.8m Total projected cost to Trust (5000 x $2154) $2,367 Average cost per paper (excl. VAT) 5000 Total number of papers attributed to Trust in typical year