Research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s most influential global health charities, cannot currently be published in several leading journals as these journals do not comply with its open-access policy. These journals include Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The bar is a result of the Gates Foundation’s policy in support of open access and open data, which was first announced in 2014 but came into force at the beginning of 2017.
The foundation, which is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, stipulates that the researchers whom it funds must make open their resulting papers and underlying data sets immediately upon publication. And papers must be published under a licence that allows unrestricted reuse — including for commercial purposes.
While some journals do not offer this kind of open-access (OA) publishing, several of them allow papers to be made free to read after an embargo period, usually of around six months, and let authors upload accepted manuscripts online. But neither policy meets the Gates Foundation’s requirements. Therefore, for papers submitted from the start of 2017, a few top journals are currently off limits to Gates-funded academics.
According to Dick Wilder, associate general counsel with the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program, the clash will affect only a few hundred research papers. The foundation typically sees around 2,000—2,500 papers published each year from its funding, of which 92% are published in journals that comply with its OA policy.
Still, the discussions could result in influential journals making special arrangements with the Gates Foundation to permit OA publishing. If that happens, it would be the first time that journals such as Nature and Science have allowed a group of scientists an open-access publishing route based on their funding source.
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