Carlos Rossel | Team Open

"Because of restrictive copyright policies, academic research is too often kept from serving its intended purpose of informing and improving the world. So it was exciting when the World Bank instituted an open access policy in 2012. The resulting Open Knowledge Repository has released thousands of publications freely under Creative Commons licenses. 'There have been over two million downloads since the launch of the repository,' says Carlos Rossel, leader of the Bank’s open access initiative. Additionally, Carlos has discovered that a large majority of academics he’s surveyed have assigned resources from the repository to their classes, a fact he attributes to the research’s free availability. Carlos says the authors are happy too. 'They can see how many times —– and from where — their research articles have been downloaded' ..."