14.1 Authors must ensure, in advance of making any agreement with or commitment to a publisher at any stage, that the agreement or commitment does not conflict with the author's obligations under the Wellcome Trust Grant Conditions. Specifically, authors should inform the journal that they have an existing obligation to deposit in PMC, and investigate whether the publisher's policy is in conflict with this obligation.
14.2 The Wellcome Trust's Grant Conditions are mandatory and binding on institutions, grant holders, and all others supported by a grant. An author's obligations to the Wellcome Trust will therefore, in almost all cases, pre-date any agreement with a journal.
14.3 Authors are unlikely to be able to comply with the Grant Conditions if, without reaching a specific agreement with the journal about deposition of a copy of the final paper in PMC, they transfer their copyright (or undertake to do so in the future) to a journal.
14.4 If such a conflict exists, authors have a variety of options:
(a) Grant a licence of their copyright to a journal instead of assigning. Such a licence would have to deal with the rights granted to the journal in such a way as to allow the journal to publish but still allow the author to deposit in PMC. In this way, authors should be able to retain ownership of their copyright and still allow publication in a journal. This could be achieved, for example, through using one of the Creative Commons licences.
(b) Agree to a journal's normal arrangements only on the condition that it be specifically agreed that deposition in PMC can take place. Copyright agreements can take many forms, but the following is an example of the sort of wording that could be included in an agreement with a journal that would still allow an author to comply with the Wellcome Trust Grant Conditions:
Notwithstanding any of the other provisions of this agreement, the journal acknowledges that the researcher will be entitled to deposit an electronic copy of the final, peer-reviewed manuscript into PubMed Central (PMC) (or UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) once established). Manuscripts deposited with PMC (or UKPMC) may be made freely available to the public, via the Internet, within 6 months of the official date of final publication in the journal.
(c) Reconsider where to publish. This is anticipated to be an exceptional circumstance. It is also worth noting that the UK Research Councils and a number of national and non-government funding agencies around the world have adopted very similar positions, which make it likely that that the arrangements suggested here will become part of normal research practice within a few years. http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_wtd018855.html#P131_11480
