Ashley Farley of the Gates Foundation: “Knowledge should be a public good.” – ScienceOpen Blog

"What’s it like working for the Gates Foundation? How much of your time do you spend working on ‘open’ related things?

I really love working for the Gates Foundation – it’s providing me with the opportunity, each day, to work towards a greater good. A message that is posted throughout the foundation is 'All Lives Have Equal Value' and I take this to heart. This is the first institution where I have been employed to embrace innovation and move initiatives forward fairly quickly. One of our tenets is that we will take risks that others can’t or won’t and I’m proud of this. Currently, I spend about 90% of my time on Open Access. This encompasses internal and external communications, advocacy of our policy, and working with our grantees to make their research open access. We’ve recently joined the newly launched Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) to work with other research funders worldwide to adopt mandates like ours. Together we can create a funding environment where Open Access or even Open Science is the norm. I am beginning to see the impact that my work has on the scientific community and it’s very exciting. We have other partnerships in the works that will be announced soon to continue to support the Open Access movement.

The Gates Foundation has what we might consider a quite progressive Open Access policy. How did this policy come about, and what was your role in its development?

Since 2003 with the creation of the Global Access Strategy the foundation is continuing to improve on transparency and openness. Why should we and our grantees pay to access the work that we fund? The policy was formulated by a small working group, which included people with diverse rules within the foundation. As the policy would affect all grants throughout the entire foundation, it was important to include the individual perspectives and experiences of the different program teams. After an in-depth landscape analysis of Open Access, a policy was presented to the Executive Leadership Team, and it was accepted and officially announced November 2014. The policy included a two-year transition period, which was critical for its success. It gave us the time to communicate the policy, both internally and externally, as well as working with publishers to reach policy compliance. Other funders, such as Wellcome Trust, were indispensable in helping form the policy and we are so grateful to follow their lead.

I came on-board during the implementation stage of the policy. I played a role in the development of Chronos. This is a tool/service developed to help make compliancy easier for our grantees when they are ready to publish their research. As many have experienced (and I recently learned) the publication process is complicated and time consuming. Our goal in creating Chronos is to ease the frustration, speed up the publication process, and more effectively track our research impacts. This will be the first time that the foundation can easily see articles published by our researchers.

Do you think it’s easier for ‘private’ funders such as the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust to adopt stronger stances towards open than say government funders? Why do you think this is?

Yes, overall I think it’s much easier for private funders to enforce a mandate than government funders. I think there are a lot of factors at play here, including financial and political aspects. We are lucky to be able to pay for the Open Access fees for all grantees. Other funders might not have this capability and the financial burden would fall to authors. I also hear concerns surrounding the concept of 'academic freedom' and the publication needs surrounding academic advancement. While we don’t have the answer to these concerns, our first goal is finding innovative solutions to the health problems facing the world. We care very much about our grantees and their career goals and are working consistently to ensure all needs are met. I hope through the ORFG we can work with other funders to have conversations about these concerns and work on implementing solutions."