After the Gates Foundation Open Access Policy

• Author: John Willinsky
• Date: January 22, 2015

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has demonstrated the power of philanthropy to reshape the world. Among the many instances, an earlier one touching my own area of work, which involves research on public access to research and scholarship, has been the PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, which “is the first open-access journal devoted to the world’s most neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) …affecting the world’s forgotten people,” as the journal describes itself. The launch of the journal was funded by the Gates Foundation. The pointedness of its stance matters. The Foundation enabled a new and open journal that changes the field of research.

This is high-impact philanthropy. Its singular-minded agenda is not always welcomed by everyone. There’s been a backlash against some of the Foundation’s education “experiments,” most notably from Anthony Cody in his book The Educator and the Oligarch. And while I have yet to be party to any Gates’ funding (in the interests of full disclosure), I can say that a second venture in scholarly communication demonstrates well enough the upside and downside of big philanthropy.

On November 21, 2014, the Gates Foundation announced an Open Access Policy for the research that it sponsors. As of January 1st, 2015, any publications resulting from research funded by Gates must be made “open access” and placed under a Creative Commons license (CC by 4.0).

What is path-breaking to this policy, however, is its “two-year transition period,” in which “publishers will be permitted to apply up to a 12 month embargo period on the accessibility of the publication and its underlying data sets.” Then, “this embargo period will no longer be allowed after January 1, 2017.”

The Gates Foundation is declaring that this concept of publishing embargoes – intended to protect journal subscriptions – is no more than a transitional stage on the road to a state when research and its underlying data “will be accessible and open immediately.” The Foundation has crossed a line. It is treating open access not as a concession subject to crippling terms, but as the natural state of research. It is “how we work,” the Foundation declares on its website.

It is easy to imagine that the Gates Foundation policy will come to influence many open access policies, such as that of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which has had a 12-month embargo since 2008 with no reference to it ending. It will send a further signal to the publishers that the time of open...