The World Health Organization (WHO) open access policy applies to:
- all articles or chapters that are authored or co-authored by WHO staff, or by individuals or institutions funded in whole or in part by WHO and published by external publishers
- publications published by WHO
How do I comply?
You can make your work open access by self-archiving in Pure or publishing open access in a peer-reviewed journal or open research platform.
All published outputs must be openly licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY).
A version of the article (either the final Version of Record or an Accepted Manuscript) must be deposited in Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) or PubMed Central (PMC) by the official publication date and openly licenced under one of the following licences:
Publishing open access in a journal or publishing platform
Authors are recommended to publish in a journal fully covered by one of our existing publisher agreements.
Use our search tool to check if a particular journal is covered.
If the chosen journal is not covered by an agreement:
- Reasonable article processing charges (APCs) will be covered by WHO for articles published in open access journals or on open research platforms indexed by the Directory of open access journals and have an agreement with the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) to deposit the Version of Record in PubMed Central (PMC).
- WHO invites external entities applying for project support from WHO to include such costs, where appropriate, in their applications.
- WHO will include the open-access publication fees, where appropriate, in its applications to donors for project support.
Chapters in scientific books
Chapters in scientific books must be made openly accessible in a public repository as soon as possible after publication, and no later than 12 months after publication, under either a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisation licence (CC BY 3.0 IGO) or a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisation licence (CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO).