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We are grateful to members of the web community, including Peter Murray-Rust (¡°Blogger set on smoothing road to open access¡±, News, March), who are working hard to enrich the data on open access publishing and to highlight current problems.

At the Wellcome Trust, we recognise that subscription-based publishers are still developing their systems to accommodate the open access business model, and we urge them to make these changes as quickly as possible. Although there are only a small number of articles that the Wellcome Trust has paid to be open access that have remained behind a paywall, this is never an acceptable situation.

The bigger issue, however, concerns the high cost of hybrid open access publishing. The average article processing charge in a hybrid journal was found to be almost twice that for a born-digital, fully open access journal ($2,7, compared with $1,418). We need to find ways of balancing this by working with others to encourage the development of a transparent, competitive and affordable market in article pricing charges.

Robert Kiley
Head of digital services
Wellcome Trust