You’ve probably already seen the news, but the Gates Foundation and AAAS have come to an agreement that will allow all Gates Foundation funded research to be published with a CC-BY license in Science, Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling, Science Advances, Science Immunology, and Science Robotics. This now puts Science journals in line with the Gates Foundation open access policy and gives Gates funded researchers an option to publish in those journals.
It’s great to see funders using their leverage to promote greater access to scientific articles. It will be interesting to see if other publishers end up coming to similar agreements with Gates, and if other funders try a similar route in providing access to their funded-research.
The agreement includes a $100,000 payment to Science to help offset any lost revenues with the CC-BY license. The Gates Foundation anticipates publishing between 10-15 studies in AAAS journals in 2017, so that works out to $6,666 to $10,000 per article/study. Pretty pricey when you compare it to APC costs.
Here’s the announcements about the agreement. It’s interesting to note the differences between them.
AAAS announcement: http://www.sciencemag.org/about/aaas-and-gates-foundation-partnership-announcement
Gates Foundation announcement: https://medium.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundation/taking-steps-to-expand-access-to-high-quality-scientific-publishing-6db7a6bfe9be#.8zh9w2xwl
Nature News: http://www.nature.com/news/science-journals-permit-open-access-publishing-for-gates-foundation-scholars-1.21486?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews
