The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is to require its grantees to publish in open-access journals beginning in 2017, ScienceInsider reports.
Additionally, the foundation will oblige its researchers to publish their articles under a license that allows others to reuse and distribute it, ScienceInsider says, as well as make the data on which the paper is based freely available. The foundation will cover the author fees that open-access journals often charge.
This, ScienceInsider's Jocelyn Kaiser notes, is "further than policies of other major biomedical research funders."
"This will enable other researchers to access the latest evidence and draw on it to advance their own research," Trevor Mundel, the president of global health at the Gates Foundation, writes at Impatient Optimists, the foundation's blog.
Until 2017, Kaiser says that researchers supported by Gates may continue to publish in other journals, so long as their articles are made freely accessible within 12 months.