The Gates Foundation came up with an open access publishing platform

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Gates Open Access, an open access publishing platform, the Nature report shows. With this platform, the Gates Foundation hopes to accelerate publication of articles and data.

The Foundation does not play editorial oversight and it contracted management of publishing services to F1000Research, an organization that is known for quickly publishing open access articles. The foundation provides article-processing charges (APCs), which ranges from $150 to $2500.  All articles are subjected to post-publication peer review processes.

The Gates Foundation particularly wants to provide help to authors in developing countries. It also believes that this platform will help to protect authors against predatory publishers out.

The UK-based Wellcome Trust, a research funding agency, has been using similar approach. The European Commission (EC) is also considering to implement a similar strategy.

This new initiative demonstrates the Gates Foundation’s commitment to research and research output dissemination.

See the sources

Berkeley commits to accelerating universal open access, signs the OA2020 Expression of Interest

Berkeley | The University Library at UC Berkeley took a major step today in its commitment to achieving universal open access for scholarly journal literature by signing the OA2020 Expression of Interest, in collaboration with UC Davis and UC San Francisco.

OA2020 is an international movement, led by the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich, to convert the entire corpus of scholarly journal literature to open access by the year 2020. Open access promotes free, immediate access to research articles and the rights to use these articles to advance knowledge worldwide. OA2020 is a framework to achieve open access, and one solution for the rising costs of subscription journals and the need for reduced barriers in accessing and reusing information.

“Our mission, as scholars and educators, is to generate new knowledge for the benefit of the world,” explains Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and professor of economics and information. “Much of the world can’t read our publications. They can’t get access because they can’t afford it. As the nation’s premier public research university, we need to be leaders in the effort to change that.”

When an institution joins the OA2020 movement, it agrees to make a good faith effort to devise and implement practical strategies and actions for attaining universal open access for scholarly journal literature. OA2020 provides the flexibility for institutions to define for themselves how they will repurpose their journal subscription funds to support open access publishing.

Read the full article on Berkeley

FP7 post-grant open access pilot project is coming to an end

In 2015, the EU FP7 announced a post-grant pilot project to ensure all FP7 funded projects are published in open access, even after the funding program ended. The objective of this pilot project is to encourage researchers to publish their work on open access platforms. To ensure this, the EU makes post-FP7 published articles eligible for article processing charges (APCs) reimbursement. Nonetheless, this fund is primarily aimed for research grants that did not cover research publishing funds on gold open access journals.

The post-grant pilot project allows researchers and institutions to seek APCs refunding. According to this pilot project, articles and monographs are eligible for a maximum of 2,000 and 6,000 euros, respectively.

Reimbursements

The program runs until the end of April 2017. A report shows that the project has already attracted a lot of applications for reimbursement. Not all application can get approval, however. According to OpenAire, so far nearly 800 submitted requests (covering more than 500 projects) have been fully or conditionally approved for reimbursement. In total, the FP7 pilot project report shows, 950,933 EUR has been distributed. This makes the average paid 1,623 euro per publication. About 6% of the request approved came from books and monographs. The rest went to published articles.

About 58% (462) of the approved reimbursement went to five countries: Spain (168), UK (160), Italy (113), Germany (106) and the Netherlands (73). The top five journals where those articles and monographs were printed are Scientific Reports (89 publications), PLoS ONE (68), Nature Communications (40), Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (23) and Sensors (22).

Most FP7 grants did not earmark APC funds. However, following the EU’s 2012 open access policy, the APCs became an integral part of the Horizon 2020 research grants.

See sources

Big Foundations Keep Making Strides for Open Access Research

Tate Williams | The debate over open access publication of research is one we’ve followed with quite a bit of interest, and not just because philanthropy has planted a few stakes in the issue. As in many fields in recent decades, technology has unlocked all kinds of new opportunities and tensions when it comes to the exchange of research findings.

In the case of the open science debate in particular, critics challenging traditional peer review and publication impacts the speed of progress, as well as research in developing countries and outside of established institutions.

The tension is between the traditional journal model, in which libraries and universities pay often very high fees for published research, and a more open model, in which anyone can read articles following peer review, and even before, in some cases.

The number of open access journals has ballooned in recent years, with some philanthropic support in the form of both grants and pressure exerted by powerful private funders.

But some of the most prestigious journals out there still cling to the paywall model, even as those powerful funders have tested that grip.

The most direct confrontation lately involves the Gates Foundation. While other funders have required that research they pay for be open access, Gates released a particularly strict open access policy a few years ago, which went into effect in 2017. That pitted the foundation against journals like Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as Gates grantees became unable to publish in such titles.
Read full article on Inside Philanthropy