A consortium of six leading UK medical research charities will support the costs of making research articles from their funded research immediately and freely openly available to scientists, patients, and donors alike, through the recently announced joint Charity Open Access Fund. David Carr of the Wellcome Trust, Sanjay Thakrar of the British Heart Foundation and Matt Kaiser of Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research explain how this new partnership came about.
As charitable funders of medical research, the consortium is dedicated to maximizing the societal benefits that flow from the research funded. Making research publications openly available ensures that the knowledge and data they contain can be more widely accessed, corroborated and used to advance research and accelerate benefits to patients.
As charities supported by public donations, open access enables donors, as well as the broader public, to directly access the outputs of the research they generously support. Many of the intiative's supporters are patients and carers who are interested in and engaged with research into their diseases, so access to high-quality contemporary medical research is a boon. And this goes for doctors and healthcare professionals who treat and care for them.
Many journals use open access models, where scientists pay an article-processing charge (APC) up front, and in return, their research articles are freely available upon publication with a licence that permits re-use. While this meets the desire for immediate open access, what is needed is a sustainable and cost-effective model to ensure that the costs of publication are met.
With this in mind, Arthritis Research UK, Breast Cancer Campaign, the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research and the Wellcome Trust came together earlier this year. With the support of the UK Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC), these UK medical research charities considered how they could join forces to ensure that their researchers can access funds to publish their work in open access form.
The resulting Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) will provide block grants to 36 UK research institutions to cover APCs for research articles supported by one or more of the six partner charities. The partners have agreed consistent open access policies and committed around £12 million to COAF for a two-year pilot, commencing on October 1, 2014.
By coming together in this way, the aim is to reduce the administrative burden both on the funded institutions and on the individual partner charities, and to provide a consistent funding approach for the research communities. It is hoped that other AMRC charities will join the COAF as partners in the future.
David Carr is a Policy Adviser at the Wellcome Trust; Sanjay Thakrar is a Research Adviser at the British Heart Foundation; Matt Kaiser is Head of Research at Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research
