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Charli Colegate, Portfolio Developer in the Humanities & Social Science research funding department at Wellcome talks about how Wellcome Open Research can help researchers overcome some of the issues associated with publishing social science and humanities research.

There are significant challenges with publishing health-related humanities and social science research:

• Long publication lead-times can be vexing, particularly for those who work in fast moving fields, e.g, those working in areas related to health emergencies
• Narrow scopes of journals are a concern for those whose work is interdisciplinary. A significant proportion of the projects we fund involves work that reaches across disciplinary boundaries. We understand that finding the right ‘home’ for research of this kind can often be a struggle.
• Reaching diverse audiences can also be tricky. Your work may well have relevance to not only your discipline, but to researchers outside of your own field and even those working within health in a non-research capacity.

It can be very difficult to reach the public health practitioner if you’re publishing in a journal whose main remit is the history of conceptual feminist theory.

Wellcome Open Research provides a solution that might contribute to overcoming these challenges.

Firstly, it’s quick. See how it works here.

Secondly, Wellcome Open Research’s scope is ‘anything Wellcome has funded’, which is broad. As a result, its readership is too. It publishes articles across a wide range of biomedical subjects including neuroscience, genomics and infectious disease. It is therefore read by biomedical scientists, clinicians, others working within health research and health more broadly.

It is linked to and promoted via a number of social media platforms and is indexed in various bibliographic databases. As it is open, anyone with an internet connection can access your work, making it more likely that your research will be read by those outside of your immediate circle of peers.

Finally, it’s not just for ‘Original Research’ papers… Wellcome Open Research encourages you to initiate ongoing conversations, throughout the life cycle of your grant, not just at the end. Wellcome’s social science & humanities research portfolio includes many projects which  explore new methodologies & materials and develop novel conceptual frameworks. Wellcome Open Research article types allow you to share your methods, dataset or archival descriptions or notes on unexpected observations.

With all of this in mind, we’d encourage you to start the broader conversations you want to have about your work with Wellcome Open Research.

A couple of our funded researchers share their thoughts about Wellcome Open Research and explain why they decided to publish on our platform

“I was attracted to Wellcome Open Research as a Wellcome Trust Investigator, and also because of its progressive ethos. We have submitted three pieces of work now and have found the whole process to be efficient, friendly and very rewarding. I particularly like the open approach to reviewing, which I think results in more rounded and reflective comments from reviewers.

I have also noticed that the amount of content from social science and humanities seems to be increasing on Wellcome Open Research and I would encourage others to look seriously at this publication platform for rapid and unfettered (eg by word limit) dissemination of recent research. This is surely the future for scholarly publication.” David Clark, University of Glasgow

“Through a Wellcome Investigator Award in Humanities and Social Science, we have built a team at the University of Edinburgh, studying the influence of the World Bank on global public health. We decided to publish a special collection in Wellcome Open Research because we wanted to make the research accessible to anyone in the world, transparent with open peer-review, and disseminated quickly. The future of publishing is platforms like Wellcome Open Research and we are delighted to be the first collection.” Devi Sridhar, University of Edinburgh