Wellcome extends open-access rules to humanities

The Wellcome Trust is extending its open-access publishing policy to include monographs and book chapters, and will not insist that trust-funded researchers publish under the least restrictive creative commons attribution licence—CC BY.

The policy will mostly affect the historians of science and medical humanities researchers funded by the trust.

Publishers’ business models in these fields are still developing, said Simon Chaplin, head of the trust’s library, “so insisting on a CC BY licence for books would have been counter productive”. He added: “There is more flexibility needed in the terms of licences.”