We recognise that key research findings may be published as scholarly monographs or book chapters. We want the visibility and impact of these research outputs to be maximised.

Our open access policy applies to all original scholarly monographs and book chapters authored or co-authored by Wellcome grantholders as part of their grant-funded research. The policy does not apply to textbooks, ‘trade’ books, general reference works or works of fiction, or to collections edited, but not authored, by Wellcome grantholders.

We will make funds available for the payment of publishers’ open access monograph and book chapter processing charges.

It may be unclear whether your work is being published in a journal or as part of a book series. Some journals indexed in MEDLINE are marketed as book series. However, as all publications indexed by MEDLINE have been submitted for indexing as journals by the publisher, we consider them to be journals.

If you’re unsure, you can check the publication status or email [email protected].

To ensure your scholarly monograph or book chapter complies with our open access policy, you must make it available from NCBI Bookshelf and Europe PMC as soon as possible. It must be within six months of the publisher's official date of final publication.

Where an open access publishing fee is charged, works must be available without embargo and licensed in ways which support their re-use. CC BY is strongly preferred, however, where authors have concerns around the creation of derivative works we will accept other creative commons licences such as CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-ND.

Funding is available to cover publishers' open access monograph and book chapter processing charges.

Wellcome grantholders or publishers of research funded by Wellcome should use this deposit form to deposit a monograph or book chapter for inclusion in the NCBI Bookshelf and Europe PMC.

You need the following information to complete the form:

Open access monographs and book chapters will be freely available in both html and PDF format via the repositories.

We work with authors and publishers to ensure that a researcher's ability to choose the publisher they feel is most appropriate isn't compromised by trying to comply with our policy.

We believe adopting a strong open access mandate will give existing publishers a rationale to develop more open access book publishing options. This will encourage new, fully open access book publishers to emerge.

OAPEN has a list of compliant book publishers.

If you’re thinking of publishing a monograph or book chapter with a publisher that doesn’t have an open access option, please email [email protected]. We'll work with you and the publisher to see if it's possible to publish your work open access.

The block awards we make to organisations for open access cannot be used to cover the cost of open access fees associated with Wellcome-funded scholarly monographs and book chapters.

For more information, see how to get open access funding.

It is possible to use third-party images in open access publications, but this is a new area for many authors, publishers and image providers. There are challenges working out how images can be reused and licensed within open access content.

You should ask for permission to use the image(s) as usual.

It’s important to inform the owner of the image that your work will be published open access. However, the choice of how the image itself is licensed remains with the image’s owner.

Ideally, the image will be published under the same licence as the rest of your work, but this is not essential – the image can be licensed separately.

A number of major image providers have made their collections open access, for example the National Gallery of Art, the Getty, Wellcome Images and Yale Center for British Art.

Wellcome’s open access fund can’t be used to pay image fees. If it’s essential to use a third-party image, you can ask for the cost of reasonable image fees in your grant application.

‘Scholarly’ books are defined by their content and their intended audience.

Content - the books represent the results of original academic research, presented in accordance with recognised academic conventions, for example with rigorous inclusion of bibliographic references.

Audience - scholarly books are written by, and aimed at, those who are actively engaged with or interested in academic research, rather than a general readership.

Scholarly books are sometimes identifiable by the publisher, imprint, or series, or by the way in which they are described and marketed by publishers. They’re unlikely to be stocked by general booksellers.

Your publisher should:

Most publishers publish a print copy and an epub version of the book to sell. Some publishers offer the epub for free.

Some publishers offer royalties on print and e-book sales of open access books. This is something you can discuss during the negotiation.