Another victory of "open science"

Good wins: The Gates Foundation managed to reach an agreement with Science magazine

Julia Korowski, XX2 century

Until recently, the research of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) was ordered to enter the largest scientific journals. The reason for this is the organization's principled position on the issue of open data: it requires free articles to be posted for everyone, and it is not profitable for publishers. Good news: The Foundation managed to reach an agreement with the magazine Science (AAAS and Gates Foundation Partnership Announcement). For the first time in its more than a century history, the publication has allowed publications to be freely available.

Since January 1, 2017, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation obliges grantees to publish articles under a free Creative Commons Attribution license. It makes it possible to distribute and process materials subject to the indication of authorship, including for commercial purposes. Shortly after the introduction of the new open data policy, the charity began negotiations with the publishers of reputable scientific journals – Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) – to convince them to cooperate.

Recently it became known that the Gates Foundation has signed an agreement with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) – publisher of Science and other scientific journals under the same brand. The contract is temporary, at the end of this year the parties will review it and decide whether to extend the contract until 2018. "Both we and they hope that it will become indefinite," says Dick Wilder, a representative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Specialists of the two organizations will jointly prepare a report on how promising the publication of articles in the public domain is from a financial point of view.

As a rule, the Gates Foundation pays for the publication of each study separately, but the agreement with AAAS provides for the payment of a fixed amount – $ 100,000 per year. It is assumed that during this time the Foundation will issue 10-15 articles. Five branded journals will be available to researchers Science – actually Science, Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling, Science Immunology and Science Robotics. The young (it was created only 2 years ago) open access publication Science Advances meets the requirements of the Foundation "by default".

Open access supporters took the news with enthusiasm. "Science did the right thing by agreeing to accept the Gates Foundation policy, and Gates did well for not accepting the previous terms of the contract Science," says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project. He believes that the new agreement can convince the other sponsors: if a strict open data policy does not prevent grantees from publishing in reputable journals, then it is not worth being afraid of it. "The Gates Foundation is showing other organizations that they shouldn't worry about embargoes and licensing conditions at all," he says. "Or if they are worried about it, they need to act, and not wait for doubts to be dispelled."

The second largest charitable foundation in the world, Welcome Trust, also puts out scientific papers for everyone, but its policy is not so strict. The organization allows scientists to publish articles under the embargo for up to six months. "We welcome AAAS's efforts to make the Gates Foundation grantees publicly available and look forward to making these opportunities available to researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust," says Robert Kiley, a representative of the foundation. While AAAS does not plan to cooperate with other organizations, but at the end of 2017 it will consider such an opportunity.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  16.02.2017