In win for open access, two major funders won't cover publishing in hybrid journals | Science | AAAS

"Plan S, the open-access (OA) initiative launched by the European Commission and Science Europe in September, has gained two major new members. The Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—two of the world’s largest private foundations that support research—announced today they are joining a consortium of 11 European funding agencies in requiring their funded research to be immediately free for all to read on publication.

The two new partners add a lot of funding muscle to the effort to require scientists to publish their papers in journals that make their content free to the public, instead of charging subscriptions. The existing Plan S coalition partners, represented by Science Europe, collectively spend about $8.7 billion on research. Wellcome, based in London, funds about $1.3 billion of biomedical research per year, whereas the Seattle, Washington–based Gates Foundation spends more than $1.2 billion on global health R&D.

The largest part of the policy change is that as of January 2020, Wellcome and Gates will no longer cover the cost of their grantees publishing in so-called hybrid OA journals...

Wellcome will make two further changes that were already part of Gates Foundation OA policy: All articles must be made available under the Creative Commons attribution licence, to facilitate reuse of the content, and the research must be freely available immediately on publication. (Current Wellcome policy allows a publisher to keep an article behind a paywall for 6 months and is not comprehensive in requiring a creative commons license.) ..."