根据来自《自然》网站的消息，11月20日，盖兹基金会在华盛顿宣布，2015年1月以后，所有该基金会资助的研究项目，发表的同时必须立刻公开所有的研究数据，发表需要的费用该基金会完全支持。盖兹基金会作为国际最大的非政府研究经费资助机构之一，具有很大的领导力和示范性，相信这将激励许多类似私人基金会采用类似政策。

这一政策意味着该基金资助的研究将无法在《自然》、《科学》和《细胞》这种非开放杂志上发表。基金会现在正在制定规则，2017年前，受资助的科学家可以申请延迟1年公开数据和开放论文。也就是说2017年前论文仍然可以在许可自行开放全文的传统杂志发表，

这种政策和一些大型基金如英国Wellcome Trust和美国NIH的政策一致。但是2017年后只能在许可立刻公开的杂志上发表。该基金会的政策2017年后将和许多传统杂志的政策相抵触，这将使这些作者在投稿时必须考虑这个因素。

Gates Foundation announces world’s strongestpolicy on openaccess research.21 Nov 2014 | 18:39 GMT | Posted by RichardVan Noorden |Category: Policy, Publishing

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hasannounced theworld’s strongest policy in support of open research and opendata. If strictlyenforced, it would prevent Gates-funded researchers frompublishing inwell-known journals such as Nature and Science.

On 20 November, the medical charity, ofSeattle, Washington,announced that from January 2015, researchers it fundsmust make open theirresulting papers and underlying data-sets immediately uponpublication — andmust make that research available for commercial re-use. “Webelieve thatpublished research resulting from our funding should be promptlyand broadlydisseminated,” the foundation states. It says it will pay thenecessarypublication fees (which often amount to thousands of dollars perarticle).

The Foundation is allowing two years’ grace:until 2017,researchers may apply a 12-month delay before their articles anddata are madefree. At first glance, this suggests that authors may still — fornow — publishin journals that do not offer immediate open-access (OA)publishing, such asScience and Nature. These journals permit researchers toarchive theirpeer-reviewed manuscripts elsewhere online, usually after a delayof 6-12 monthsfollowing publication.

Allowing a year’s delay makes the charity’s open-accesspolicysimilar to those of other medical funders, such as the Wellcome Trust orthe USNational Institutes of Health (NIH). But the charity’s intention toclose offthis option by 2017 might put pressure on paywalled journals tocreate anopen-access publishing route.

However, the Gates Foundation’s policy has asecond, moreonerous twist which appears to put it directly in conflict withmany non-OAjournals now, rather than in 2017. Once made open, papers must bepublishedunder a license that legally allows unrestricted re-use — includingforcommercial purposes. This might include ‘mining’ the text with computersoftwareto draw conclusions and mix it with other work, distributingtranslations of thetext, or selling republished versions.  In the parlance of CreativeCommons, anon-profit organization based in Mountain View, California, this isthe CC-BYlicence (where BY indicates that credit must be given to the author oftheoriginal work).

This demand goes further than any otherfunding agency hasdared. The UK’s Wellcome Trust, for example, demands a CC-BYlicense when it ispaying for a paper’s publication — but does not require itfor the archivedversion of a manuscript published in a paywalled journal.Indeed, manyresearchers actively dislike the thought of allowing such liberalre-use oftheir work, surveys have suggested. But Gates Foundation spokeswomanAmy Enrightsays that “author-archived articles (even those made availableafter a 12-monthdelay) will need to be available after the 12 month period onterms andconditions equivalent to those in a CC-BY license.”

Most non-OA publishers do not permit authorsto apply aCC-BY license to their archived, open, manuscripts. Nature, forexample, statesthat openly archived manuscripts may not be re-used forcommercial purposes. Sodo the American Association for the Advancement ofScience, Elsevier and Wileyand many other publishers (in relation to theirnon-OA journals).

 “It’sa major change. It would be major if publishers that didn’tpreviously use CC-BYstart to use it, even for the subset of authors funded bythe Gates Foundation.It would be major if publishers that didn’t previouslyallow immediate orunembargoed OA start to allow it, again even for that subsetof authors. And ofcourse it would be major if some publishers refused topublish Gates-fundedauthors,” says Peter Suber, director of the Office forScholarly Communicationat Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 “Youcould say that Gates-funded authors can’t publish in journalsthat refuse to useCC-BY. Or you could say that those journals can’t publishGates-funded authors.It may look like a stand-off but I think it’s the startof a negotiation,” Suberadds — noting that when the NIH’s policy was announcedin 2008, many publishersdid not want to accommodate all its terms, but now alldo.

That said, the Gates Foundation does notleave as large afootprint in the research literature as the NIH. It onlyfunded 2,802 researcharticles in 2012 and 2013, Enright notes; 30% of thesewere published in open accessjournals. (Much of the charity’s funding goes todevelopment projects, ratherthan to research which will be published injournals).

The Gates Foundation also is not clear onhow it willenforce its mandate; many researchers are still resistant to theidea of opendata, for instance. (And most open access mandates are not in factstrictlyenforced; only recently have the NIH and the Wellcome Trust begun tocrackdown). But Enright says the charity will be tracking what happens andwill writeto non-compliant researchers if needs be. “We believe that thefoundation’s OpenAccess Policy is in alignment with current practice andtrends in researchfunded in the public interest.  Hence, we expect that the policy willbereadily understood, adopted and complied with by the researchers we fund,”shesays.