Last week, the Gates Foundation announced that it will now require all grantees to make the results of their research publicly accessible immediately. Researchers will only be able to publish their research in scientific journals that make the published papers accessible via open access - which rules out publishing in many prominent journals such as Science and Nature.
Inside Higher Education detailed the new policy:
The sweeping open access policy, which signals the foundation’s full-throated approval for the public availability of research, will go into effect Jan. 1, 2015, and cover all new projects made possible with funding from the foundation. The foundation will ease grant recipients into the policy, allowing them to embargo their work for 12 months, but come 2017, “All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period.”
“We believe that our new open access policy is very much in alignment with the open access movement which has gained momentum in recent years, championed by the NIH, PLoS, Research Councils UK, Wellcome Trust, the U.S. government and most recently the WHO,” a spokeswoman for the foundation said in an email. “The publishing world is changing rapidly as well, with many prestigious peer-reviewed journals adopting services to support open access. We believe that now is the right time to join the leading funding institutions by requiring the open access publication of our funded research."
But the Gates Foundation policy goes further than other funding instutions. Once the papers are available publicly, they must be licensed so that others can use that data freely, even for commercial purposes. A news article in Nature explains the change:
The Gates Foundation’s policy has a second, more onerous twist which appears to put it directly in conflict with many non-OA journals now, rather than in 2017. Once made open, papers must be published under a license that legally allows unrestricted re-use — including for commercial purposes. This might include ‘mining’ the text with computer software to draw conclusions and mix it with other work, distributing translations of the text, or selling republished versions. In the parlance of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization based in Mountain View, California, this is the CC-BY licence (where BY indicates that credit must be given to the author of the original work).
This demand goes further than any other funding agency has dared. The UK’s Wellcome Trust, for example, demands a CC-BY license when it is paying for a paper’s publication — but does not require it for the archived version of a manuscript published in a paywalled journal. Indeed, many researchers actively dislike the thought of allowing such liberal re-use of their work, surveys have suggested. But Gates Foundation spokeswoman Amy Enright says that “author-archived articles (even those made available after a 12-month delay) will need to be available after the 12 month period on terms and conditions equivalent to those in a CC-BY license.”
The Gates Foundation has funded approximately $32 billion in research since its inception in 2000 and funds about $900 million in global health funds annually. That’s a smaller impact than, say the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which funds about $30 billion in health research. But it does represent nearly 3,000 papers published in 2012 and 2013. Only 30 percent of those were published in open access journals.
Previously: Teen cancer researcher Jack Andraka discusses open access in science, stagnation in medicine, Exploring the “dark side of open access”, White House to highlight Stanford professors as “Champions of Change”, Stanford neurosurgeon launches new open-source medical journal built on a crowdsourcing model, Discussing the benefits of open access in science and How open access publishing benefits patients
Photo of Bill and Melinda Gates by Kjetil Ree
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