Funding the Way to Open Access

"These events encouraged the Trust to investigate the publication of scientific research, to see if there was anything research-funding organisations could be doing to stimulate change in what appears to be a failing market. As it turns out, there is quite a lot. I now believe it is the funders of research—charities, governments, and other publicly funded bodies such as national research agencies—who hold the purse strings that can untie scientific discoveries from a publishing market that is no longer serving the community as well as it could. That is why today the Trust is a leading advocate for enabling free access to research literature through support for new publishing models, such as that of the Public Library of Science, and the establishment of publicly accessible repositories, working in partnership with the United States National Institutes of Health–funded PubMed Central [1].

It is worth noting that the Trust is not a novice in seeking better ways to disseminate research findings. The fact that the sequence of the human genome is an openly accessible work is due in large measure to the Trust's determination that this information be in the public domain and not hidden behind commercial subscriptions. As a consequence of that insistence, we believe, these data are a more widely used and valuable resource....

This study convinced the Trust that the best way forward to improve access to research findings would be through open access to scientific research articles. This essentially means two things: first, that the copyright holder or holders must grant to the public a free, irrevocable, perpetual license to use, copy, distribute, and make derivative works of their research article, in any medium for any purpose (excepting those that constitute plagiarism or other dishonest acts, of course); and second, that a digital copy must be deposited in an open public archival repository (for example, the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central). Whilst a debate continues as to the most appropriate route to achieve open access to all research literature, it is important to bear in mind that the publication and the archiving of research articles are intrinsically linked. Both aspects of open access need to be explored and experimented with, and the Trust is actively pursuing solutions for the problems of both...."