The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as promoter of Open Research

Abstract

An online interview with Ashley Farley, program officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As of 2023, the Gates Foundation earmarks some 8,000,000,000 US Dollars annually to its various philanthropic goals. Focusing on global health and global development, the Gates Foundation supports a wide range of research and development activities in fields such as child nutrition, family planning, eradication of poverty and diseases, etc. In this podcast, Farley explains why open research lies at the heart of the Gates Foundation’s strategies.

The Gates Foundation has been an early adopter and partner of the European Plan S initiative, which from the very start has been very well aligned to its own policies. Gates Foundation grantees are obliged to make all publications stemming from project funding available in open access, and, if possible, to archive their research datasets openly as well. The Gates Open Research Platform (a combination of a preprint-service and a megajournal) is an alternative route for grantees who do not want to publish their articles through traditional publication outlets. Accompanying datasets are stored elsewhere but with links from the platform. In addition, the non-profit organization OA.Works helps the Gates Foundation monitor that requirements are met. Among other things, OA.Works has been instrumental in setting up a Share Your Paper service to help researchers (not just grantees of the Gates Foundation) verify whether a version of their article can be legally uploaded to the Green Open Access repository Zenodo. Farley is also working directly with publishers to make sure that Gold Open Access that has been paid for is provided properly and in line with the contract. The Biden Administration recently announced a Year of Open Science in the USA. Farley sees various agencies, such as NASA, as driving forces behind this declaration. Gradually, a cultural shift is bound to take place, as prejudices towards open sharing of data, peer review reports and even grant applications will be replaced with a culture permeated by more open and transparent ways of doing research, Farley argues. She also argues strongly in favor of the Rights Retention Strategy and sees it as a way of empowering researchers by securing that they have more control of their work.

First published online January 31, 2023.