The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s OA and Open Data Policy

At the end of November, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced its new OA policy. It went into effect on Jan. 1, 2015, and will impact a great deal of research related to international development and global affairs. The policy covers both publications and data:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committed to information sharing and transparency. We believe that published research resulting from our funding should be promptly and broadly disseminated. We have adopted an Open Access policy that enables the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed published research funded, in whole or in part, by the foundation, including any underlying data sets.

The policy stipulates that publications and datasets must be deposited in a specified repository and be available for reuse via a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. In order to allow for a period of adjustment, the foundation provided for a 2-year transition period, during which articles may be published in journals requiring up to a 12-month embargo period. However, after that transition period, articles must be published in such a way that they are immediately openly accessible. Research data will also have a 2-year transition period, during which the same 12-month embargo period is allowed.

Nature Publishing Group’s Confusing Announcement

In December, Macmillan Science and Education and Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced that they are “opening up” access to research in new ways; however, the NPG announcement only allows for highly limited access. Under the new model, subscribers are able to share URLs to articles with nonsubscribers, and researchers are able to annotate NPG articles via the ReadCube platform. NPG’s Sharing Terms of Use spells out the limited ways in which readers may interact with its content:

We support a reasonable amount of sharing of content by subscribers and authorised [sic] users, for personal, non-commercial use. By using the unique URL (“shareable link”), you agree to these terms. For these purposes, NPG considers academic use (by researchers and students) to be non-commercial. Subscribers may occasionally share a shareable link to a read only version of the full text article. Use cases permitted are laid out in our Principles and Guidelines. Recipients will need to be able to receive the shareable link and view it on our site.

Among many other limitations, readers must view articles on NPG’s site and won’t be able to print them out. Many members of the OA community have raised concerns about this announcement. A blog post by Peter Murray-Rust offers an overview of the problems with the new access model.

International OA News

In Ecuador, the Network of Open Access Repositories of Ecuador (RRAAE) launched. According to the press release:

The network integrates institutional repositories of universities and supports the management, preservation, open access, and interoperability of digital content generated by members and other institutions around the country. The network will increase the visibility of the scientific production of academic knowledge distributed in different national institutional repositories, thereby contributing to the development of education in our country.

Right before the end of the year, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), a central funding organization for basic research in Austria, announced its new OA policy. Like the Gates Foundation’s policy, all FWF-funded research—including both peer-reviewed publications and data—must be freely available through the internet.

In India, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and Department of Science & Technology (DST) announced a breakthrough OA policy in mid-December. The policy includes a few unusual elements. First, it is retroactive and covers research papers resulting from funds received starting with the 2012–2013 fiscal year. All of these papers are required to be deposited into an OA repository. Second, “authors are recommended to also deposit manuscripts of their earlier publications even if they are unrelated to current projects funded by DBT or DST.”

Furthermore, in an unusual step, the policy explicitly denounces the journal impact factor as a measure of quality and instead encourages researchers to “publish their work in journals of their choice, because researchers are the best judges of where to publish their work.” As noted in the policy:

The DBT and DST affirm the principle that the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, should be considered in making future funding decisions. The DBT and DST do not recommend the use of journal impact factors either as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.

While a great deal of discussion has occurred in the past few years in opposition to the journal impact factor, the Indian policy is unusual—and highly progressive—for including such a statement.