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In this guest post, Hannah Hope, Open Research Co-ordinator at Wellcome, explains how the funder is aiming to put open into action via their new publishing platform Wellcome Open Research.

At Wellcome, we are committed to improving health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive. Our researchers are central to this. The accessibility of the work that they do greatly affects the impact that it can have on improving health. Wellcome Open Research is our latest action to support the publication of the research we fund in a way that we think increases its potential impact.

We believe that to get the most out of our research investment, research outputs must be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable – known as the FAIR principles. While support for the FAIR principles is widespread, many traditional publishing outlets place restrictions on authors that can make it difficult for them to fully follow them in their publications. Whether due to copyright limitations, formulaic article types, word or figure limits, these restrictions hamper the flow of information between researchers, research, and others who want to engage with it.

With Wellcome Open Research we’re removing these barriers and giving our researchers the freedom to decide what they need to publish and when, empowering them to adopt research values of openness and transparency that are important to Wellcome. The platform provides a venue for all original research funded or co-funded by Wellcome, and with over 10 different article types we hope our grantees find that we are providing the flexibility they need to publish all results, tools, methods and observations. Our platform is open – all articles are free to access, without delays after submission thanks to the post publication peer review process. Reviews are published alongside research, supporting recognition of reviewers as well as improving transparency.

The underlying data/code will be available to those who wish to reuse it*, supporting another area important to Wellcome; research reproducibility. The platform also provides authors and readers with article level metrics to allow them to gauge the impact of the article and find related work.

As it is our platform, grantees don’t need to worry about article processing charges, Wellcome will cover the publication costs directly.

So that is our action, now we need you! This open access week, put open into action by submitting to Wellcome Open Research and get your research out there.

If you’re not funded by Wellcome, you can still get involved when we launch our content in a couple of weeks’ time by accepting invitations to review content from us and by reusing the information and data on the platform. Visit WellcomeOpenResearch.org for more information.

*where data involves sensitive information, some restrictions may apply.