Two of the world’s largest biomedical research funders have backed a plan to make all papers resulting from work they fund open access on publication by 2020.
On 5 November, the London-based Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, announced they were both endorsing ‘Plan S’, adding their weight to an initiative already backed by 13 research funders across Europe since its launch in September. The plan was spearheaded by Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission’s special envoy on open access.
The Wellcome Trust, which gave out £1.1 billion (US$1.4 billion) in grants in 2016–17, is also the first funder to detail how it intends to implement Plan S. Its approach suggests that journals may not need to switch wholesale to open-access (OA) models by 2020 to be compliant with Plan S — if the initiative’s other backers decide on a similar line.
The biomedical charity already has an OA policy, but in some cases it allows an embargo of up to six months after publication before papers have to be made free to read. The organisation says that by January 1, 2020, it will ban all such embargoes.
Wellcome-funded work will not be able to appear in Nature, Science and other influential subscription journals unless these publications permit Wellcome-funded papers to be published under OA terms (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature).
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, said that it would update its policy to comply with Plan S over the next 12 months.
Plan S also states that scientists cannot publish in ‘hybrid’ journals, which collect subscriptions and charge for some papers to be made OA. Wellcome says that it will stop paying OA fees for articles published in hybrid journals. But it will not bar papers resulting from research it has funded from hybrid journals if the authors can find another way to pay, or if a journal agrees to let authors also post their accepted manuscripts elsewhere at the time of publication under OA terms.
Essentially, this follows the spirit of statement by the backers of Plan S that some hybrid-journal publishing would be allowed for a transitional time.
Meanwhile, the Gates Foundation, which already demands immediate OA for the papers that result from the research it funds, said it would update its policy to comply with Plan S over the next 12 months. The initiative’s hybrid-journal component is the only part not covered under Gates’ current policy, a spokesperson says.
Taken as a whole, the revised policies put more pressure on non-OA journals to change the way they operate, says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Gates Foundation, which spent $4.7 billion in 2017, much of it on science, has been influential in changing the policies of subscription journals by demanding research they fund is made OA on publication.
Since 2017, when the foundation began enforcing its policy, journals including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have been offering a permanent OA publishing route for the charity’s grant holders. The Gates Foundation also arranged a pilot partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC, which publishes Science, under which around 25 papers were published under OA terms. That trial ended in June.
The Wellcome Trust’s new OA policy also says that when there may be a significant public-health benefit to sharing preprints widely — such as during a disease outbreak — the work it funds must be published before peer review under a liberal licence.
The 13 other funders that support Plan S are expected to launch a public consultation on their implementation ideas at the end of November.
STM, a global trade association for academic and professional publishers, has welcomed the efforts of orgainisations such as the Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation to work towards expanding access to peer-reviewed scientific works to maximise their value and reuse.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
