Wellcome and Gates join bold European open-access plan
peter.suber's bookmarks 2018-11-05
Summary:
"Two of the world’s largest biomedical research funders have backed a plan to make all papers resulting from work they fund open access on publication by 2020.
On 5 November, the London-based Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, announced they were both endorsing ‘Plan S’, adding their weight to an initiative already backed by 13 research funders across Europe since its launch in September. The plan was spearheaded by Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission’s special envoy on open access....
[Wellcome] already has an OA policy, but in some cases it allows an embargo of up to six months after publication before papers have to be made free to read. The organization says that by 1 January 2020, it will ban all such embargoes....
Wellcome says that it will stop paying OA fees for articles published in hybrid journals. But it will not bar papers resulting from research it has funded from hybrid journals if the authors can find another way to pay, or if a journal agrees to let authors also post their accepted manuscripts elsewhere at the time of publication under OA terms.
Kiley adds that until 2022, Wellcome will also support hybrid journals if their publishers have made ‘transformative OA agreements’ and are en route to becoming OA....
Meanwhile, the Gates Foundation, which already demands immediate OA for the papers that result from the research it funds, said it would update its policy to comply with Plan S over the next 12 months. The initiative’s hybrid-journal component is the only part not covered under Gates’ current policy, a spokesperson says.
Taken as a whole, the revised policies put more pressure on non-OA journals to change the way they operate, says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I applaud Wellcome and Gates for taking this step,” he says, adding that Harvard University has already decided not to pay open-access fees for publishing in hybrid journals...."