European Commission May Join Gates Foundation And Wellcome Trust In Becoming An Open Access Publisher

from the if-you-want-a-job-done-properly,-do-it-yourself dept

Open access isn't a new idea -- the term was first defined back in 2002, and arguably the first examples go back even further to the founding of arXiv.org in 1991 (pdf). And yet progress towards making all academic knowledge freely available has been frustratingly slow, largely because hugely-profitable publishers have been fighting it every inch of the way. In response to that intransigence, academics have come up with a variety of approaches, including boycotts, mass cancellation of subscriptions, new kinds of overlay journals and simply making everything available with or without permission. Here's another interesting move to open up publishing, reported by the journal Science:

One of Europe's biggest science spenders could soon branch out into publishing. The European Commission, which spends more than €10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a "publishing platform" for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe.

It was quite surprising to see the Wellcome Trust start its own rapid-publishing unit, called Wellcome Open Research, a move that seems to have encouraged the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to follow suit with the similar Gates Open Research platform, due to start publishing later this year. For the EU's main executive body to do the same is even more extraordinary. It's true that there has been no official announcement about the European Commission's publishing move, but the Science article suggests that it is likely:

A commission spokesperson says the two charities [Wellcome and Gates Foundation], which opted for a system in which papers are reviewed after publication, are "models," but that the commission is only "considering" the idea. But last week in Berlin, at a closed meeting of the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP), European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas suggested a "decision" to create the platform had already been made, says Michael Mabe, CEO of the London-based International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM). OSPP member Sabina Leonelli of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who tweeted from the meeting, confirms Mabe’s assessment.

For three giant funding organizations -- the Wellcome Trust, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the European Commission -- to be driven to take this step shows just how frustrated they all are with the academic publishing world's unhelpful response to two decades of calls for open access. It also underlines that they now seem determined to open up the research they fund by bypassing completely the traditional publishers who are proving so obstructive.

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Filed Under: european commission, open access, research
Companies: gates foundation, wellcome trust

The Gates Foundation Emerges As A Leader In The Fight For Full Open Access And Open Data

from the great,-so-how-about-open-source-too? dept

As Techdirt readers know, the battle to provide open access to the world's research has been going on for many years now. Despite the clear benefits of sharing information freely, the top academic publishers are still resisting, which probably has something to do with the 35% profit margins they currently enjoy. There have been various attempts to force their hand, notably through boycotts, but these have been disappointingly ineffective so far. Funding organizations have helped by requiring that any work they fund should be published as some kind of open access, but often they have been rather timid in their demands and enforcement. Against that background, the following is noteworthy:

One of the world's most influential global health charities says that the research it funds cannot currently be published in several leading journals, because the journals do not comply with its open-access policy.

Scientists who do research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are not -- for the moment -- allowed to publish papers about that work in journals that include Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

That comes from a news story published in Nature, one of the leading titles that falls foul of the new rules. These were first announced in November 2014, when Nature called them the "world's strongest policy on open access research." After a two-year grace period, the new rules have come fully into force, no exceptions allowed. There are five so-called "elements" to the new policy, including the following:

Publication Will Be On "Open Access" Terms. 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.

As that points out, the CC-BY license allows anyone to use material with attribution, including for commercial purposes. This is something academic publishers are very unwilling to allow, since it means that rivals can reprint the content immediately, and without payment.

Publications Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately. All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period. An embargo period is the period during which the publisher will require a subscription or the payment of a fee to gain access to the publication.

This is also an unusually strong demand. In the past, major funders have meekly allowed an extended period of exclusivity to publishers in the form of an embargo before research is available under open access terms. The new requirement by the Gates Foundation is therefore a bold move, and again something that publishers have always fought hard against.

Data Underlying Published Research Results Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately. The foundation will require that data underlying the published research results be immediately accessible and open.

A separate requirement for open data recognizes that the underlying results are just as important as the main findings, and that they should be available under an open license for other researchers to use freely.

The Nature story says that the new rules will only affect a few hundred research papers, since 92% of the 2,000-2,500 papers published each year with funding from the Gates Foundation are in journals that already comply with the stringent open access policy. However, the ones that currently don't meet them are big names in the world of scientific publishing, which sets up an interesting battle of wills. It's one that Peter Suber, a key figure in the open access movement, thinks that the Gates Foundation is likely to win:

"I predict that the Gates Foundation won't compromise. The journals ought to compromise, and in due time, I predict that they will," says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Suber recalls that in 2008, many journals were unwilling to accommodate a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy, which, at the time, mandated that papers be made freely available no later than 12 months after publication. "Essentially, the NIH forced publishers to choose between accommodating the new policy and refusing to publish the large volume of high-quality research by NIH-funded authors," he says. In the end, publishers accommodated the policy, Suber notes. He expects that the Gates policy will draw the same concessions from publishers.

If Suber is right -- and he usually is on these matters -- this will represent a serious defeat for the old-style, dog-in-the-manger publishers, who have hitherto regarded themselves as indispensable and thus able to dictate terms to the open access movement and their funders. It might encourage other organizations to impose similar terms, and to usher in finally the long-awaited open access revolution.

The Gates Foundation is therefore to be congratulated on making this stand for both open access and open data. However, there is a certain irony here that an organization fighting so hard for openness should be funded by a man whose huge fortune is based on selling software that is resolutely closed source.

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Filed Under: open access, open data
Companies: gates foundation

Ford Foundation Joins Hewlett Foundation And Gates Foundation In Requiring Research They Fund To Be Released Under CC BY Licenses

from the no-public-domain? dept

Over the last few months, a bunch of big foundations have officially stated that all research that they fund via their grants now has to be placed under an open Creative Commons license such as the CC BY license that says that the information can be freely shared and copied, even for commercial purposes, with the only restriction being that you have to attribute the content to the original authors. In September of last year, the Hewlett Foundation kicked it off when it announced that it was requiring CC BY licensing on all content that it funded, followed in November by the Gates Foundation making a similar announcement. And, this week, the Ford Foundation has done the same:

The Ford Foundation announced today that it is adopting an open licensing policy for all grant-funded projects and research to promote greater transparency and accessibility of materials. Effective February 1, grantees and consultants will be required to make foundation-funded materials subject to a Creative Commons license allowing others, free of charge and without requesting permission, the ability to copy, redistribute, and adapt existing materials, provided they give appropriate credit to the original author.

The Ford Foundation has long supported transparency—including open licensing, which is an alternative to the traditional “all rights reserved” copyright and encourages sharing intellectual property in a digital global commons. By moving to broadly disseminate a large amount of educational and research materials resulting from its funding, the foundation hopes to make its work and the work of its grantees more accessible and ultimately, increase its impact.

This is absolutely awesome, and hopefully more Foundations will follow suit. It would be nice if these foundations also offered up the opportunity to use a CC0 public domain dedication as an alternative (which goes even further than the CC BY license), but that seems like nitpicking for the most part.

Frankly this is great for a few different reasons. First, we've discussed the importance of open access and information sharing as it relates to research -- and it's still depressing how much important research gets locked up behind paywalls and stringent copyright enforcement. Second, increasing the amount of work, in general, that is freely shareable can only lead to that work being much more useful to -- and used by -- others who are looking to build on that work and do great things with it. Third, just in getting more people to realize that -- contrary to what some maximalists like to pitch in their propaganda -- not everything needs to be locked up to be valuable.

Kudos to these foundations for taking a stand.

Filed Under: cc by, creative commons, foundations, funding, grants, open access, research
Companies: ford foundation, gates foundation, hewlett foundation

Bill Gates Evidently Gets Open Access And Open Data: So What About Open Source?

from the baby-steps dept

One of most important ways of helping to promote open access is for major research organizations to make it a condition of their funding. Two of the pioneers in this respect were the Wellcome Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which made open access a requirement in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Here's another major funder joining the open access club:

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.

Specifically, the CC-BY license, one of the most open, 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.

Now, this is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation making this announcement, not Bill Gates, but it's hard to believe he doesn't know about and approve of the move. After all, it represents a very high-profile boost for the idea that making things freely available for anyone to "transform and build upon" is better than locking things up so that neither of those is possible. So the natural question is: when will Gates admit the same is true for software too?

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Filed Under: bill gates, education, knowledge, open access, open source, research
Companies: gates foundation

Dailydirt: GMO Food -- You Are What You Eat?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are invading the food chain. Some folks say that the trend to grow more and more GMO food is almost a requirement to keep up with the world's demand for food. Others disagree, arguing that there are alternatives to GMOs that could meet demands without potentially endangering our fragile ecosystem. Here are just a few examples of the seemingly unstoppable development of GMOs for food.

• If there was a baby formula product that came from a cow and was more similar to human breast milk, would mothers be wiling to try genetically modified cow milk? The Magic8ball says: "My sources say no." [url]
• The Gates Foundation is working on GMO crops to increase food production in developing nations. But there are ethical questions about using the developing world as an experiment for GMO foods. [url]
• The FDA has reviewed the first genetically modified animal for human consumption -- the AquAdvantage salmon. This fish grows bigger and faster than wild Atlantic salmon, and it's made sterile so its genes won't get loose in the environment. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: aquadvantage, food, gmo, milk, salmon
Companies: fda, gates foundation

Is The Gates Foundation Really Looking At New Ways To Tackle Big Health Problems When It's Hiring Pharma Execs?

from the doesn't-seem-right dept

The Gates Foundation has plenty of opportunities to do some amazing things with the size of its fund and the ability of Bill Gates, in particular, to command attention. And, yet, hearing that it's now hired a former Big Pharma exec to run its Global Health Program has to make you wonder if the Gates Foundation is focused on increasing health in the world... or increasing the health of big pharmaceutical companies, which have been struggling lately. One of the biggest problems with healthcare today is making the debate pharmaceutical-centric, rather than health centric. Yes, drugs are a part of a comprehensive healthcare plan, but, too often, policymakers and groups let pharma firms drive the debate, when they're an (extremely) biased party that has a long history of not doing what's best for everyone's health, but what's best for their own profits. And, to be clear, I have no issue with pharmaceutical firms looking to maximize profit. But I do have issues when they use unfair or questionable means to do so, when that can create serious harm and limited access to medicines. The Gates Foundation could have totally changed the debate. But, instead, it seems to be doing the opposite.

Filed Under: healthcare, innovation, pharma
Companies: gates foundation

DailyDirt: Spare A Square..?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Toilet humor might be funny to a wide audience, but to some folks, toilets are not a laughing matter -- it's business. Here are a few projects that are attempting to improve toilet technology.

• Some MIT business students are headed to Nairobi to start a toilet business. The pitch goes something like: "Everyone poops -- if we can just capture a fraction of that market..." [url]
• A pocket urinal for guys (which is basically a packet of diaper material) sounds like a great novelty gift. But there's probably an available surplus of NASA astronaut diapers now... why not wear some of those instead? [url]
• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending $3 million to re-invent the toilet. Hmm. One team for this challenge is going to develop microwave technology to transform human waste into electricity. [url]
• To find more interesting stuff on entrepreneurship, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: diapers, toilets, urinals
Companies: gates foundation, nasa