Open access publishing in the biomedical sciences: could funding agencies accelerate the inevitable changes?

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Sciences
• Scholarly Communication
• Information Access

Background:

• Open access (OA) is significantly improving access to scientific information.
• Key research funders like the Wellcome Trust, National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Research Councils UK (RCUK) issued position statements in 2005.
• These statements often mandated depositing final manuscripts in OA repositories within 6-12 months of publication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the open access position statements from major biomedical funding bodies.
• To analyze publisher models for providing open or delayed access to research.
• To assess the growing trend of OA support among global research funders.

Main Methods:

• Review of open access position statements from prominent funding agencies.
• Analysis of publisher-specific OA models (e.g., Oxford Open, HighWire Press, BioMed Central, PLoS).
• Examination of the increasing number of freely accessible articles in PubMed.

Main Results:

• Major funding bodies have established policies promoting open access for research.
• Various publisher models exist to facilitate open or delayed access, catering to different needs.
• Over 1.2 million articles are now freely accessible via PubMed.

Conclusions:

• Funding agencies play a crucial role in accelerating the adoption of open access.
• The number of funding bodies endorsing open access is steadily increasing.
• Global research funders are committed to making research findings accessible without barriers.