Bill Gates and the True Nature of Open Access - Technology Blog and Community from IT Experts - ComputerworldUK.com

"I've been writing about open access - the application of open source-like principles to academic research publications - for many years now. Its steady ascent is both undeniable and with luck unstoppable. Here's the latest vote of confidence in both open access and open data from a rather unexpected source: 'The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committed to information sharing and transparency. We believe that published research resulting from our funding should be promptly and broadly disseminated. We have adopted an Open Access policy that enables the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed published research funded, in whole or in part, by the foundation, including any underlying data sets.' Interestingly it's the CC-BY licence, one of the most open, that has been adopted ... All publications shall be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0) or an equivalent license. This will permit all users of the publication to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and transform and build upon the material, including for any purpose (including commercial) without further permission or fees being required. Here are some figures that give an idea of the Foundation's scale and impact: [1] Asset Trust Endowment: $42.3 billion [2] Total grant payments since inception: $31.6 billion [3] Total 2013 grant payments: $3.6 billion [4] Total 2012 grant payments: $3.4 billion ... Requiring open access to all publications that result from work it funds is not just a huge practical boost for the idea, it should offer validation for remaining sceptics of the whole concept. After all, a move of this magnitude would surely only have been made if Bill Gates approved, which indicates that he, too, has begun to appreciate the power of openness ... This new requirement by the Gates Foundation will also increase the pressure on traditional academic publishers to move towards providing open access to their journals, otherwise they risk being shunned by researchers funded by the Gates Foundation and many others with similar policies. Here's one example of that starting to happen, announced today: 'All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December. The content-sharing policy, which also applies to 48 other journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG) division, including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics, marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles.' Macmillan is pretty much the Microsoft of the academic publishing world, so this is a significant move. But it's important to understand what it is - and what it is not. For example, this is not open access by any means: papers can be read on the screen, but not downloaded or printed ..."