Research Funders -- Ideas

[Jennifer McLennan]

More than 200 agencies of all types – institutional, departmental, governmental, private, etc. – have crafted policies requiring that the research they fund be made available to the general public.

• During Open Access Week 2009, The UK’s Wellcome Trust announced it would commit 2 million pounds to support publication in open-access journals (http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press%20releases/2009/W...). The Trust also supports the open availability of its funded research through a policy that requires Open Access six months after publication in a journal (http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Spotlight-issues/Open-acc...).
  
• The U.S. National Institutes of Health revised its policy for public access to publicly funded in research in 2008, so that NIH-funded are required to deposit copies of final, peer-reviewed manuscripts in the NLM online archive so that they may be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in a journal (http://publicaccess.nih.gov).
  
• In 2009 the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) – a major funding agency for science and scholarship since 1986 in Hungary – introduced an open-access mandate, requiring that all scientific publications supported by OTKA grants must be made openly available.
  
• Autism Speaks became the first U.S. advocacy organization to adopt a policy requiring funded researchers to deposit manuscripts in PubMed Central, reflecting the public access policy of the NIH. (http://www.autismspeaks.org/science/overview/policies/policy_on_pub...)
  
• Open Access Week is also a great way to showcase what funders have done to leverage their investments through Open Access, in editorial or video, such as this video with the Wellcome Trust’s Mark Walport (http://www.vimeo.com/1865535).

If you represent a funding agency, you can use Open Access Week as an opportunity to weigh the
merits of adopting a similar policy or open-access publication fund. For more details on what specific research funders are doing and what your options are, visit http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/articles/open-access-policy-o....