The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will require grant recipients to publish publicly available articles

Bill and Melinda Gates fund a large number of global health research. The fund itself spends tens of millions of dollars to support research authors. Now this organization is changing the rules for supporting researchers. In particular, since 2017, grantees are required to publish their articles in the public domain.

Until this time, authors who have received funding from the foundation may publish their articles in scientific journals that provide materials on a fee basis. But the author must guarantee that his work will be published in the public domain after 12 months.

After 12 months, the magazine should open access to work. At the same time, the text of the study is available to everyone, both for distribution and for the use of materials by other researchers. Actually, the text should be published under the Creative Commons license . Well, since 2017, all the works of authors whose research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation should be published immediately in the public domain, without any restrictions.

This policy of the Fund is much more stringent than the rules of most other foundations, which allow their authors to publish articles in journals with a paid subscription for readers, subject to the publication of materials in the public domain after six months or a year. It is worth noting that there are many scientific journals that publish articles by authors in the public domain. Such magazines take a fee from the authors for publishing the material. And the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will pay, including this fee.

The Gates Foundation’s initiative has been praised by some experts, such as the executive director of the SPARC Open Access Law Group in Washington.

The fund spends about $ 900 million annually to support research on global health issues. The fund-sponsored authors publish about 1,400 materials a year, only 30% of which appear in open access journals.