Wellcome Trust Open Research

Wellcome Trust Open Research
Name	Wellcome Trust Open Research
Type	Scholarly publishing platform
Founded	2016
Headquarters	London
Parent	Wellcome Trust

Wellcome Trust Open Research Wellcome Trust Open Research is an open-access publishing platform launched to accelerate dissemination of biomedical and public-health research, enabling rapid publication of datasets, protocols, and preprints. The platform emphasizes transparency in peer review and aligns with funder mandates from biomedical funders and research councils, while interfacing with repositories, learned societies, and academic publishers. It serves researchers funded by philanthropic organizations and governmental agencies by combining article platforms, data-sharing services, and open peer review workflows.

Overview

The platform was created to provide immediate posting of reports and data with subsequent open peer review, integrating practices from bioRxiv, medRxiv, F1000Research, PLOS, eLife, Nature Communications, The Lancet, BMJ, and Science Advances. It supports publication types common in biomedical publishing such as original research, systematic reviews, case reports, and data notes, and it interoperates with indexing services like PubMed Central, CrossRef, ORCID, Scopus, and Web of Science. The service is situated within the landscape of funder-driven publishing initiatives that include programs by National Institutes of Health, European Research Council, Wellcome Trust, Gates Foundation, and UK Research and Innovation.

History and Development

The initiative was announced amid policy shifts from major funders and organisations including Wellcome Trust, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Science Europe, cOAlition S, and Plan S advocates. Its launch in 2016 paralleled similar moves by F1000Research and later developments at bioRxiv and medRxiv, and it responded to debates involving stakeholders such as COPE and STM publishing committees. Early governance referenced reports from Royal Society, House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and advisors from universities such as University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University.

Platform and Features

Functional elements include immediate article posting, mandatory data availability statements, versioning, open peer review, and article-level metrics tied to identifiers such as DOIs via CrossRef and contributor identifiers via ORCID. The technical stack leverages standards and tools used by Figshare, Zenodo, Dryad, Dataverse, GitHub, and GitLab for code and data deposition, and integrates with metadata frameworks employed by ROR, Schema.org, DataCite, and Creative Commons. The platform supports transparent workflows similar to those adopted by eLife, PLOS One, PeerJ, and BMC Medicine and provides compatibility with archiving services such as CLOCKSS and Portico.

Submission and Peer Review Process

Authors—often affiliated with institutions like University College London, University of Edinburgh, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Karolinska Institutet—submit manuscripts that receive a DOI and are posted prior to peer review, enabling rapid dissemination akin to arXiv and bioRxiv. Peer review reports, editor decisions, and author responses are published openly, drawing procedural parallels with F1000Research and community review models championed by eLife. Reviewers may be sourced from professional networks including Royal Society of Medicine, Academy of Medical Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, and specialist societies such as American Medical Association and European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

Funding and Governance

The platform is funded and overseen by the Wellcome Trust, which has related grant programs and policy teams that interact with bodies like UK Research and Innovation, National Institutes of Health, European Commission, Gates Foundation, and philanthropic actors including Wellcome Trust. Governance relies on editorial boards and advisory panels drawing members from institutions such as University of Oxford, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Yale School of Medicine, and international organizations including World Health Organization and UNICEF. Financial models reflect funder mandates on article processing charges and align with open-access initiatives like Plan S and consortia negotiations involving Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis.

Reception and Impact

The platform has been cited in policy documents from World Health Organization, National Institutes of Health, European Commission, UK Government, and in guidance by Wellcome Trust itself, and it influenced practices at journals such as The Lancet, BMJ, Nature Medicine, Cell, and Science Translational Medicine. Researchers from institutions including Imperial College London, University of Cambridge, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and UCL have used it for rapid reporting during public-health emergencies alongside preprint servers like medRxiv and collaborative infrastructures such as Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and REACT study teams. Citation tracking via Scopus, Clarivate, and Google Scholar shows uptake in certain subfields, and data reuse has been facilitated by links to repositories such as ENA, GenBank, SRA, and ArrayExpress.

Criticisms and Controversies

Critiques have focused on overlap with existing platforms including bioRxiv, medRxiv, and F1000Research, tensions with commercial publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature, and debates involving policy groups like cOAlition S and Committee on Publication Ethics. Concerns raised by stakeholders at Universities UK, Wellcome Trust, Research Councils UK, and editorial boards at The Lancet and BMJ include the potential for duplication, sustainability of funding models used by Wellcome Trust, and implications for reward structures in academia as debated in reports by Royal Society and Nuffield Council on Bioethics. High-profile discussions involving figures and institutions such as Tim Berners-Lee, Francis Collins, Dame Sally Davies, and Paul Nurse have shaped criticism and reform proposals.

Category:Open access publishing