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Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust, Two of the World's Largest Biomedical Research Funders, Back Europe's Ambitious Open-Access Plan (nature.com) 22

Two of the world's largest biomedical research funders have backed a plan to make all papers resulting from work they fund open access on publication by 2020. From a report: On 5 November, the London-based Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, announced they were both endorsing 'Plan S,' adding their weight to an initiative already backed by 13 research funders across Europe since its launch in September. The plan was spearheaded by Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission's special envoy on open access. The Wellcome Trust, which gave out $1.4 billion in grants in 2016-17, is also the first funder to detail how it intends to implement Plan S. Its approach suggests that journals may not need to switch wholesale to open-access (OA) models by 2020 to be compliant with Plan S -- if the initiative's other backers decide on a similar line.

The biomedical charity already has an OA policy, but in some cases it allows an embargo of up to six months after publication before papers have to be made free to read. The organization says that by 1 January 2020, it will ban all such embargoes. Wellcome-funded work will not be able to appear in Nature, Science and other influential subscription journals unless these publications permit Wellcome-funded papers to be published under OA terms. Researchers that the charity funds could still publish in subscription journals, says Robert Kiley, Wellcome's head of open research. But only if those journals agree that the authors can immediately deposit their accepted manuscript in the PubMed Central repository under a liberal publishing licence. Some publishers, such as the Royal Society in London, already allow this.

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Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust, Two of the World's Largest Biomedical Research Funders, Back Europe's Ambi

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  • Plan S is there to contaminate my precious body fluids [wikipedia.org].
  • I thought these 3 bits were worth pointing out to those that never read the articles:

    The Wellcome Trust, which gave out £1.1 billion (US$1.4 billion) in grants in 2016–17, is also the first funder to detail how it intends to implement Plan S. Its approach suggests that journals may not need to switch wholesale to open-access (OA) models by 2020 to be compliant with Plan S — if the initiative’s other backers decide on a similar line.

    The biomedical charity already has an OA policy, but in some cases it allows an embargo of up to six months after publication before papers have to be made free to read. The organization says that by 1 January 2020, it will ban all such embargoes.

    Wellcome-funded work will not be able to appear in Nature, Science and other influential subscription journals unless these publications permit Wellcome-funded papers to be published under OA terms (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature).

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm currently at Elsevier. This is one of the things that has management here actively and violently shitting their pants.

      • I'm currently at Elsevier. This is one of the things that has management here actively and violently shitting their pants.

        That is good to hear. The best way to eliminate parasites is to cut off their source of sustenance.

      • I'm really bitching out for "Informative" points, eh? Well anyway:

        Elsevier is an information and analytics company and one of the world's major providers of scientific, technical, and medical information. It was established in 1880 as a publishing company. It is a part of the RELX Group, known until 2015 as Reed Elsevier.

        Headquarters: Amsterdam, Netherlands
        Revenue: 2.48 billion GBP (2017)
        CEO: Ron Mobed (Aug 2012–)
        Parent organization: RELX Group
        Subsidiaries: Cell Press, Current Opinion, MORE
        Imprints: Academic Press, Mosby, Churchill Livingstone, Saunders, Pergamon Press

    • This is all good. The next step is to require all results to be published. Currently, "negative" results are often left unpublished. But it is often as important to know what doesn't work as it is to know what does.

      Where would we be today if Michelson and Morley hadn't published their "failure" to measure the ether?

  • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @04:11PM (#57596310)

    "Researchers that the charity funds could still publish in subscription journals, says Robert Kiley, Wellcome's head of open research. But only if those journals agree that the authors can immediately deposit their accepted manuscript in the PubMed Central repository under a liberal publishing licence. Some publishers, such as the Royal Society in London, already allow this."

    Elsevier already allows this.

    • With a fee.

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        That doesn't even make sense.

        You are allowed to submit your paper, which is to be published in an Elsevier journal, to a preprint server (axiv being the most famous of these), completely for free.

        The only restriction is that you can't submit the Elsevier copyedited and formatted version. The version you formatted yourself is fine.

        • No, pubmed is simply not part of their accepted repositories for accepted manuscript publishing pre-embargo. Only arXiv and RePEc are, which only deal with limited subject matter. So if you want to put it on pubmed pre-embargo you'll have to pay for making it an OA article first.

          There are all kinds of bizarre limitations to manuscript publishing from Elsevier, at least for the researcher himself. Anyone else can do far more with it once they get it, because they can use the manuscript with CC-BY-NC-ND. It o

          • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            I have an official Elsevier web page that says submission to preprint servers (it doesn't mention specific ones) is fine, given the restrictions I mentioned. I have a dated hardcopy of that page just in case. I checked before submitting a paper.

            • Preprints are useless after publication because they can be out of date, the Accepted Manuscript which Robert Kiley mentioned is the one you know will be identical to the paper in content.

              https://www.elsevier.com/about... [elsevier.com]

              "by updating a preprint in arXiv or RePEc with the accepted manuscript"

              • I should has said they are useless for academics who want to reference the paper, they need to be certain they are truly referencing it as printed.

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