The Wellcome Library, “one of the world’s major resources for the study of medical history,” and for related social and scientific issues, has just launched a new Wellcome Library Open Access Fund “to pay the open access publishing costs for research papers, monographs and book chapters that result from research based on the Wellcome Library’s collections.” The Library’s “collections must have substantively informed the work,” and “the research article, monograph or book chapter must have been peer reviewed and accepted for publication.”
The Wellcome Library is part of the Wellcome Collection in London, supported by the Wellcome Trust, ” a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health,” founded in 1936 and based on the personal collections of Henry Solomon Wellcome, the Trust’s creator.
The Library’s Archives and Manuscripts collection constitutes “the most important collection of manuscripts and archives on the history of medicine in Britain,” and the Library also hosts several other invaluable collections, including an Art Collection, an Asian Collection, and contemporary video and audio materials. So the types of publication are potentially quite broad, even if books are specifically supposed to be “‘scholarly’ books … defined by their content and their intended audience. In terms of content, they represent the results of original academic research, presented in accordance with recognised academic conventions.”
“The Library has a fantastic collection,” said Head of Library Simon Chaplin, who also pointed out that many researchers and authors using the Library are not affiliated to major organizations. Scholars and writers of all kinds could be receiving a publication boost courtesy of the new funding. 
