Open Access Week at Communications Biology | Nature Research Cancer Community

"With regards to the benefits of Open Access publishing, Dr Duffy states:

‘Open access publishing has made our research findings widely available. This is particularly important for our research as fibropapillomatosis tumors affect sea turtles worldwide across tropical and subtropical regions. Therefore, many of those interested in combatting the disease are not necessarily associated with well-funded academic institutions and as such have limited access to research that is kept behind a paywall. Many groups tackling fibropapillomatosis are grassroots conservation organizations and rehabilitation facilities, and every dollar goes towards their conservation and animal rehabilitation objectives. Most organizations of this kind simply do not have the resources to pay for access to the most up-to-date research findings. Additionally, as some of our research is funded by charitable organizations and government funders (i.e. tax dollars), putting the results behind a paywall rather than making them available to all might be considered somewhat unfair.  Open access enables the maximum return on those investments, as conservation and research groups can continue to equally benefit and build on this information. Such discrepancies between public funding and private access are partially recognized by the growing number of funders who require findings to either be published in open access journals, or at least have non-formatted versions of manuscripts available in public repositories. ..."