Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles | Science/AAAS | News

"Breaking new ground for the open-access movement, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of global health research, plans to require that the researchers it funds publish only in immediate open-access journals. The policy doesn’t kick in until January 2017; until then, grantees can publish in subscription-based journals as long as their paper is freely available within 12 months. But after that, the journal must be open access, meaning papers are free for anyone to read immediately upon publication. Articles must also be published with a license that allows anyone to freely reuse and distribute the material. And the underlying data must be freely available. The immediate access requirement goes further than policies of other major biomedical research funders in the United States and Europe. Most encourage their researchers to publish in immediate open-access journals, but allow delayed access after an embargo of 6 to 12 months. (Most subscription-based journals, including Science, allow authors to comply with those policies.) The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-access journals ..."