The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of global health research, plans to require that the researchers it funds publish only in immediate open-access journals.
The policy is expected to be initiated by January 2017. Until then, grantees can publish in subscription-based journals as long as their paper is freely available within 12 months. But after that, the journal must be open access, meaning papers are free for anyone to read immediately upon publication. Articles must also be published with a license that allows anyone to freely reuse and distribute the material. And the underlying data must be freely available.
The immediate access requirement goes further than policies of other major biomedical research funders in the United States and Europe. Most encourage their researchers to publish in immediate open-access journals, but allow delayed access after an embargo of 6 to 12 months. The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-access journals.
According to Heather Joseph, executive director of the open-access advocacy group SPARC, the policy is a giant step forward for Open Access policies.
According to foundation communications officer Amy Enright, the Gates Foundation spends about $900 million a year on its global health programs, mostly on research that results in roughly 1400 research papers a year, 30% of which now appear in open-access journals.
