Advocating for broader immediate access to published scientific research, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has announced significant changes to its publishing policy. The new policy, which will take effect on January 1, 2022, will require all HHMI laboratory heads to publish in a manner that makes their research articles freely available on the publication date under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
HHMI’s policy outlines the new requirements and a number of options that HHMI scientists have to meet the open access mandate. The goal of the policy is to ensure that when HHMI research is published, it is shared with immediate open access and without restrictions on subsequent use, enabling others to build on the work to accelerate discovery.
The policy aligns with the principles of Plan S, which was developed by the cOAlition S organisations, a group leading the open access movement in Europe and elsewhere. Plan S takes effect in January 2021. HHMI is joining other participants in cOAlition S, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome, in the drive towards open access publishing.
The new policy represents a major change for the Institute, a medical research organisation that spends more than $750 million annually on basic biomedical research and employs more than 2,300, including more than 250 HHMI Investigators at laboratories throughout the United States and 44 lab heads at the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. HHMI’s current publishing policy requires that each HHMI lab head make their work available online freely within 12 months of publication.
The new policy is HHMI’s latest step in its efforts over two decades to influence and catalyse important changes in scientific publishing that foster greater access to scientific outputs. In 2003, HHMI hosted a key meeting in which the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing was drafted, leading to an early working definition of open access publication in the life sciences and biomedicine. In 2007, HHMI became one of the first research organisations in the United States to adopt a public access publishing policy. Four years later, in 2011, the Institute joined with Wellcome and the Max Planck Institute in creating the open access journal eLife. More recently, the Institute has advocated for more transparent and community-driven publishing practices, including the use of preprints as a means of making scientific research freely available and faster. It has also changed its guidelines to allow HHMI scientists to include preprints among the published research articles they submit when they undergo scientific review.
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