Speaker
Description
As a global research foundation, the Wellcome Trust is committed to ensuring that the outputs of research (including publications, datasets, software and materials) can be widely accessed and used in ways that will maximise the benefits to health and society. We are a long-standing champion of open access and research data sharing, and established a dedicated Open Research team in 2017 to spearhead our work in this space.
One of the key priorities for the Open Research team has been to look at how Wellcome can lead as a funder, and work with the wider research community, to ensure that the work researchers do to make their research outputs available to others is recognised and rewarded appropriately. For over a decade, our Open Access policy has emphasised that for research publications it is the intrinsic merit of the work that matters and not where it is published. We were an early signatory to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), and are working to ensure that our own funding decisions take into account the full and diverse range of valuable outputs that result from research. In November 2018, we announced a requirement as part of our new Open Access policy that organisations we fund should also publicly commit to these principles.
My talk will summarise our work as a funder to incentivise open research, focusing in particular on ongoing work to implement DORA and define how we will work with our communities to roll out and assess implementation in organisations in receipt of our funding.
