It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. Its goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action. Today we are exploring open access policy within philanthropy by interviewing Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust. From brokering the Bermuda Principles for immediate sharing of DNA sequence data in 1996 to being the first funder to mandate open access to our funded publication in 2005, Wellcome has been at the forefront of open research for over two decades.

CC: Can you describe the Wellcome Trust and your role within the organisation?

RK: Wellcome exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive. We’re a global charitable foundation, both politically and financially independent. We support scientists and researchers, take on big problems, fuel imaginations, and spark debate.

I’m currently on secondment from the Wellcome Library and am the Development Lead for Open Research. In this role I’m responsible for developing a strategy for the Wellcome Trust which will set out what we could do to move the needle in making research outputs findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable – the FAIR principles.

The Wellcome Trust has had an open access policy in place for several years now, and other philanthropic grantmakers such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Ford Foundation have adopted similar policies that require open licensing for the outputs of grant funding. Can you describe the motivation behind the adoption of a CC BY open access policy for Wellcome funded research?

We believe that the full research and economic benefit of published content will only be realised when there are no restrictions on access to, and re-use of, this information.

When we first setup our open access policy in 2005, we simply required authors to agree that articles would be made available online. We didn’t specify an open license that needed to be used. Over time, we began to understand that requiring an open license would help realise the full benefits of the research. From a practical perspective, mandating an open license helps us communicate the access and re-use rights, thus making it easier for downstream users to understand how they can use it. We’d also seen that some of our research had been published on a commercial website and had been subject to a takedown from the rightsholder. By adopting an open licensing policy we could make sure that the research funded by Wellcome is widely available without these troubles.

Related to this, open licensing allows for our research to be share beyond the traditional publication channels, and can help reach audiences where they are. So, for example, an article studying the effects of, say, breastfeeding, published under open access licence, can be posted on other platforms like Facebook or Mumsnet in order to reach the communities who get their information there. This is made possible with an open license like CC BY.

Equally, openly licensed content can be translated without first seeking permission from the rights holder.  Again, this helps to increase the reach (and potential impact) of the research we fund.  

Following on from that question, do you have thoughts on the intersection of open policy adoption between private funders like Wellcome and public research funding bodies? Do you see learnings or best practices that could be exchanged between these various funders, and whether there are particular considerations that should to be addressed so that the research that comes out of each funding stream is maximally useful for those that need it?

In some ways it might be easier for private organisations like Wellcome and Gates to adopt progressive open access policies. But from the government perspective the argument for open access is clear. And in the UK, the CC BY requirement applies to all research funded through the Research Councils UK (RCUK) when an APC is levied.

The government wants taxpayer-funded research to be openly reusable. It makes good economic sense, and can drive innovation and promote access to knowledge.

From CC’s point of view, we know that open licensing is only one aspect of a successful open access policy implementation, and that there are many other policy considerations and practicalities that need to be aligned. These include providing education and guidance for authors on publishing and licensing options, repository and deposit requirements, attaching metadata to promote search and discovery, data management, and policy compliance. Wellcome’s recent communication regarding publisher requirements seems to reflect a similar need for a holistic approach for OA policy implementation. Can you explain a bit more about these requirements, and why Wellcome decided to adopt them?

We make our Open Access funding available to institutions as block grants, and every year those institutions report back to us information on the outputs of that funding. We analyse the data, so we can determine how much an average APC charge was, and where the research was published. We’re also able to ascertain whether the institutions are following the requirements attached to the funding, for example whether an article was made available through in the relevant repository (Europe PMC), whether the appropriate license was used, etc.

Our analysis showed that in a number of cases where Wellcome was paying the fees, we weren’t getting what we paid for.  The the 2014-15 analysis showed that  around 30% of the papers were not fully compliant with our open access policy requirements. As a result, we recently created a set of publisher requirements, which makes explicit the things we expect from publishers when Wellcome pays an APC. For example, publishers must commit to the ongoing responsibility of keeping the articles up-to-date, including noting corrections, substantial revisions, license changes, and retractions.

There are huge opportunities—and many challenges—regarding the transformation of scholarly communications in service of improving access to research that could help solve global health problems. Is there a particular project or policy aspect that Wellcome is most interested in pursuing related to this objective?

We recently launched Wellcome Open Research, a platform for our grantees to rapidly publish any output from their research. This includes everything from typical research articles and data sets to case reports, notes, protocols, and even negative results. The platform is built on the F1000Research publishing model, which works on a post-publication peer review system.

Articles are submitted to the platform and checked to verify authorship and pass other applicable considerations, such as ethics clearance, plagiarism detection and data availability. Once it’s passed these minimal checks, the article is formally published and is assigned a citation and DOI. Publication will typically happen within 5-7 days. After that, peer review begins. Everything is done in public, and the outputs are openly licensed—usually CC BY for articles, and CC0 for data.

Wellcome is also supporting the work of ASAPbio (and others) to encourage the sharing of preprints in the life and biological sciences.  We believe that sharing of preprints provides researchers with a fast way to disseminate their work, establish priority of their discoveries, and obtain feedback. They also offer a more current understanding of an investigator’s work.

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Today kicks off Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. Its goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

For nearly 15 years, Creative Commons licenses and legal tools have been used to share scholarly articles and data on more open terms than the standard “all rights reserved” copyright. In addition to the legal machinery that helps communicate the rights to use and reuse open access research, the movement around Creative Commons and open access has spread through academia, libraries, science, education, and public policy.

What’s been going on in Open Access over the last year? Here’s a just a brief sampling:

• CC’s Ryan Merkley thinks it’s ludicrous that the public gets such poor access to the fruits of its massive taxpayer investments in publicly funded research. Articles in The Guardian, Forbes, ArsTechnica, and The Wall Street Journal wondered the same. And Robert Darnton calls on the new Librarian of Congress to champion open access to publicly-funded research in the U.S.

• Vice President Biden launched the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which seeks to make ten years’ worth of progress on cancer research in half that time. As part of that initiative, CC continues to call for immediate open access to all publicly-funded cancer research and data. Specifically, we offered four things we can do now to unlock the cure for cancer.

• The United Nations urged governments, universities, and funders to prioritize open access to research as a means to improve global health.

• The European Union continues to push ahead in support of open science, and the Commission wants scientific data to be ‘open by default’ as a requirement for future research grants.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation launched the Reclaim Invention project to push for reforms in university technology transfer practices. CC is supporting the project as natural complement to related open access and open education initiatives in higher education.

• OASPA showed increasing growth of fully open access journals, and released an informative guide on best practices in licensing and attribution.

• More research was published that showed that publishing under open access can help researchers succeed by increasing citations and media attention, inviting potential collaborators, and opening the door to future job and funding opportunities.

Be sure to check out openaccessweek.org for more information on this week’s campaign, and make a commitment to put ‘open in action’.

Follow along with the Creative Commons blog, Twitter, and Facebook this week, and be sure to tag and share your posts with the #OAweek hashtag. We’ll be supporting Open Access Week with posts, interviews, and other activities.

Here we go!

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The National Cancer Moonshot Initiative seeks to make ten years of progress on cancer research in half that time, with a goal to end cancer in our lifetime. The project—led by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden—recently called for ideas to help shape the cancer research priorities for the Moonshot. They received over 1,600 comments and suggestions.

We offered several actions that would speed up the probability of discovery for new cancer treatments and cures. Our recommendations urged the U.S. government to make immediate open access the default for publicly funded cancer research articles and data.

The Moonshot team noted that several other commenters highlighted the importance of improving access to scientific and medical research about cancer:

Share cancer research results broadly. Require that the entire cancer community provide open, free public access to all research findings, particularly research supported by public funds.

The community comments echoed Vice President Biden’s remarks in April to the American Association for Cancer Research, in which he committed to help break down the access barriers to cancer-related research. “Taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year,” said Biden. “But once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the process along more rapidly.”

The implication is clear: if researchers do not have immediate, unrestricted access to the latest publications and data about cancer, they will be slowed in their progress in developing improved treatments and eventual cures.

The Moonshot team is now analyzing the responses to the call for comment, and they plan to release a final report this Fall. We believe that open access to government funded scientific research is absolutely critical to accelerating progress in the fight against cancer. With support from Biden and the Administration, the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative should make openness the default for cancer research.

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April saw lots of activity on the open science front in the European Union. On April 19, the European Commission officially announced its plans to create an “Open Science Cloud”. Accompanying this initiative, the Commission stated it will require that scientific data produced by projects under Horizon 2020 (Europe’s €80 billion science funding program) be made openly available by default. Making open data the default will ensure that the scientific community, companies, and the general public can enjoy broad access (and reuse rights) to data generated by European funded scientific projects. The Commission’s actions in support of open science contrasts with the approach taken by the Member States, who—although none deny the momentum to push for “open by default”—are being much more cautious in developing and publishing open science policies.

Also in April, the Dutch EU Presidency hosted an open science conference in Amsterdam. One outcome of the conference was a collaboratively developed document called the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science. The call for action advocates for “full open access for all scientific publications”, and endorses an environment where “data sharing and stewardship is the default approach for all publicly funded research”.

The 12 action items laid out in the document push to increase support for open science in Europe. We offered suggested improvements to a few of the proposed actions. First, in response to the item to facilitate text and data mining of content, we said that text and data mining (TDM) activities should be considered outside the purview of copyright altogether. In other words, text and data mining should be considered as an extension of the right to read (“the right to read is the right to mine”). However, as others have pointed out, the fact that the InfoSoc and Database directives have not been implemented uniformly across all Member States indicates a need to adopt a pan-European exception in order to provide clarity to those wishing to conduct TDM. We noted that any exception for text and data mining should cover mining for any purpose, not just “for academic purposes.” In addition, a TDM exception should explicitly permit commercial activity. Finally, we said that terms of use, contractual obligations, digital rights management, or other mechanisms that attempt to prohibit the lawful right to conduct TDM should be forbidden.

Second, we questioned why the item to improve insight into IPR and issues such as privacy needs to take into consideration activities that “will ensure that private parties will still be able to profit from their investments.” We noted that all of the proposed actions are supposed to serve the identified pan-European goal of full open access to all scientific publications.

Third, we commended the action to adopt open access principles. However, we suggested that any principles developed should tackle a wider set of issues than those identified: “transparency, competition, sustainability, fair pricing, economic viability and pluralism.” We said that open access principles should take into account the long-standing principles described by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and its 10-year update, which includes recommendations on public policy changes, licensing, infrastructure support, and advocacy. In addition, we said that the stakeholders involved in the development of any principles should include researchers, students, and the public.

Finally, on the item of how to involve researchers and new users in open science, we urged researchers to actively engage with other scientists, citizens, and non-traditional audiences. Part of this change means that academics and policymakers need to stop characterizing these other groups as “users [who] might get lost in their search for information, or draw wrong conclusions.” If we presume a default of open, we need to get comfortable with sharing—which sometimes means giving up some control—so that others can benefit. With openness in policy and practice, the communication of science can benefit not only its intended audience, but promote novel and interesting types of re-use across disciplines and and by unconventional users.

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Logo of the Wikimedia Foundation
by User:Neolux
CC BY-SA 3.0

The details of the open access policy can be found on the Wikimedia Foundation website. There will be an expectation that researchers receiving funds from the foundation will provide “unrestricted access to and reuse of all their research output…”. Published materials, proposals, and supporting materials will be covered under the open access policy. The policy states that media files must be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license (the version currently used by Wikipedia), or any other free license. In addition, the policy requires that data be made available under an Open Definition-conformant license (with the CC0 Public Domain Dedication preferred), and that any source code be licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 or any other Open Source Initiative-approved license.

The open access policy from the Wikimedia Foundation joins other institutions–including governments, philanthropic foundations, universities, and intergovernmental organizations who have adopted policies to increase access to important and useful information and data for the public good. Thanks to Wikimedia for their continued leadership in support of free knowledge for all.

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Yesterday the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced it is adopting an open access policy for grant-funded research. The policy “enables the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed published research funded, in whole or in part, by the foundation, including any underlying data sets.” Grant funded research and data must be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY). The policy applies to all foundation program areas and takes effect January 1, 2015.

Here are more details from the Foundation’s Open Access Policy:

1. Publications Are Discoverable and Accessible Online. Publications will be deposited in a specified repository(s) with proper tagging of metadata.
2. Publication Will Be On “Open Access” Terms. All publications shall be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0) or an equivalent license. This will permit all users of the publication to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and transform and build upon the material, including for any purpose (including commercial) without further permission or fees being required.
3. Foundation Will Pay Necessary Fees. The foundation would pay reasonable fees required by a publisher to effect publication on these terms.
4. Publications Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately. All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period. An embargo period is the period during which the publisher will require a subscription or the payment of a fee to gain access to the publication. We are, however, providing a transition period of up to two years from the effective date of the policy (or until January 1, 2017). During the transition period, the foundation will allow publications in journals that provide up to a 12-month embargo period.
5. Data Underlying Published Research Results Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately. The foundation will require that data underlying the published research results be immediately accessible and open. This too is subject to the transition period and a 12-month embargo may be applied.

Trevor Mundel, President of Global Health at the foundation, said that Gates “put[s] a high priority not only on the research necessary to deliver the next important drug or vaccine, but also on the collection and sharing of data so other scientists and health experts can benefit from this knowledge.”

Congratulations to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on adopting a default open licensing policy for its grant-funded research. This terrific announcement follows a similar move by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who recently extended their CC BY licensing policy from the Open Educational Resources grants to now apply foundation-wide for all project-based grant funds.

Regarding deposit and sharing of data, the Gates Foundation might consider permitting grantees to utilize the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, which allows authors to dedicate data to the public domain by waiving all rights to the data worldwide under copyright law. CC0 is widely used to provide barrier-free re-use to data.

We’ve updated the information we’ve been tracking on foundation intellectual property policies to reflect the new agreement from Gates, and continue to urge other philanthropic foundations to adopt open policies for grant-funded research and projects.

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The law applies to grantees who receive research funds from the Department of Public Health, and those grantees are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning manuscripts submitted to journals fully comply with AB 609. For an article accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, the grantee must ensure that an electronic version of the peer-reviewed manuscript is available to the department and on an appropriate publicly accessible database approved by the department within 12 months of publication in the journal.

Congratulations to California, the leadership of Assemblyman Nestande, and the coalition of open access supporters who worked hard to make this law a reality.

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From the press release:

The Open Access Button is a browser-based tool that lets users track when they are denied access to research, then search for alternative access to the article. Each time a user encounters a paywall, he simply clicks the button in his bookmark bar, fills out an optional dialogue box, and his experience is added to a map alongside other users. Then, the user receives a link to search for free access to the article using resources such as Google Scholar. The Open Access Button initiative hopes to create a worldwide map showing the impact of denied access to research.

The creators have also indicated that they plan to release the data collected by the Open Access Button under CC0. Congratulations on the release of this useful tool.

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We are particularly interested in and helped to shape the Open Research and Education topic stream, where we are leading an “Open Peer Learning” workshop on Wednesday (Sept 19) from 11:30am to 3:30pm. For the workshop the School of Open (co-led by Creative Commons and P2PU) is combining forces with the OKFN’s School of Data to explore, test and develop learning challenges around open tools and practices in data, research, and education. Participation in the workshop is free (you don’t even have to buy a festival ticket), but space is limited, so RSVP at: http://peerlearningworkshop.eventbrite.com/

The workshop will be held in this awesome space, reserved for four HACK workshops:

hack-2 / juhuu / CC BY-NC-SA

For those of you able to come to Helsinki, look out for our CC staff reps, Jessica Coates and Timothy Vollmer, along with many of our European affiliates who will be holding a regional meeting on Day four of the fest.

For the rest of you, you can still participate in helping to build initiatives like the School of Open from wherever you are by visiting http://schoolofopen.org/ and signing up for the mailing lists there.

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Creative Commons submitted a response to both RFIs. Below is a brief summary of the main points. Several other groups and individuals have submitted responses to OSTP, and all the comments will eventually be made available on the OSTP website.

Response to Publications RFI

• The public funds tens of billions of dollars in research each year. The federal government can support scientific innovation, productivity, and economic efficiency of the taxpayer dollars they expend by instituting an open licensing policy.
• Scholarly articles created as a result of federally funded research should be released under full open access. Full open access policies will provide to the public immediate, free-of-cost online availability to federally funded research without restriction except that attribution be given to the source.
• The standard means for granting permission to the public aligned with full open access is through a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

Response to Data RFI

• If the federal government wants to maximize the impact of digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research, it should provide explicit, easy-to-understand information about the rights available to the public.
• The federal government should establish policies that insure the public has cost-free, unimpeded access to the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. Access to this data should be made available as soon as possible, with due consideration to confidentiality and privacy issues, as well as the researchers’ need to receive credit and benefit from the work.
• The federal government can grant these permissions to the public by supporting policies whereby 1) data is made available by dedicating it to the public domain or 2) data is made available through a liberal license where at most downstream data users must give credit to the source of the data. CC offers tools such as the CC0 waiver and CC BY license in support of these goals.

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