We are delighted to announce that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has joined Open Knowledge Maps as a supporting member. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the second funding agency to join Open Knowledge Maps and the first to do so with a Visionary Membership.
“Funding-agency policies mandating that scientific papers and data are made publicly available have helped to drive the adoption of preprints, open-access publishing and data repositories. But agencies often struggle to measure how closely grant recipients comply with the funding policies. Awardees, and the institutes that employ them, can struggle to ensure they are following the rules. Now, digital tools are cropping up to help both sides of the funding equation stick to the regulations.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, has invested US$1.8 million to support the development of OA.Report, a tool that helps funders to track awardee compliance with foundation open-access policies. Developed by OA.Works in London, OA.Report uses text-mining techniques to match articles with the funder that supported the work, by sifting through academic papers and open-access metadata. The software also tracks article-processing charges, as well as the subsequent reports that summarize the outcomes of grants….”
eLife’s new publishing model has sparked vigorous discussion about the role of editors in selecting research articles for publication. In October, the organisation announced that it is eliminating accept/reject decisions after peer review and instead focusing on preprint review and assessment.
In support, a group of nine funders have committed to including reviewed preprints in the evaluation process, even if they lack the traditional stamp of approval from journal editors. Among these supporters are the Gates Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and Wellcome.
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Supporting organisations:
Cambridge University Libraries
Champalimaud Foundation
cOAlition S
Gates Foundation
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
Research Libraries UK
Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute
Wellcome
“Oakland University will share in a $7.5 million grant as part of a multi-state effort to develop an innovative, research-driven science curriculum designed to support teachers in engaging students’ natural curiosities and interests across the world.
The open-access project is being spearheaded by OpenSciEd, a major national effort designed to develop and support freely available high-quality K-12 science instructional materials and teacher professional learning resources….”
“Research Consulting and Science-Metrix are pleased to announce that we have been commissioned to undertake a new study for leading research funders Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
This work seeks to understand the impact of requirements for the rapid and open sharing of research findings and data in public health emergencies: we will focus on Covid-19 and the Wellcome-led data sharing Statement, including in comparison with the previous Statement released during the Zika and Ebola outbreaks….
To address such an ambitious brief, we have assembled a unique project team: Research Consulting’s expertise in the open research policy landscape is complemented by Science-Metrix’ (an Elsevier company) bibliometric and informetrics expertise. Our combined efforts will support the project funders in shifting from a belief that the Statement is impactful towards an evidence base that seeks to demonstrate said impact.
Our Science-Metrix colleagues have already started their analysis, and the Research Consulting team is preparing a comprehensive survey that will be shared with signatories of the Statement over the next few months….”
“Research Consulting and Science-Metrix are pleased to announce that we have been commissioned to undertake a new study for leading research funders Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
This work seeks to understand the impact of requirements for the rapid and open sharing of research findings and data in public health emergencies: we will focus on Covid-19 and the Wellcome-led data sharing Statement, including in comparison with the previous Statement released during the Zika and Ebola outbreaks….
To address such an ambitious brief, we have assembled a unique project team: Research Consulting’s expertise in the open research policy landscape is complemented by Science-Metrix’ (an Elsevier company) bibliometric and informetrics expertise. Our combined efforts will support the project funders in shifting from a belief that the Statement is impactful towards an evidence base that seeks to demonstrate said impact.
Our Science-Metrix colleagues have already started their analysis, and the Research Consulting team is preparing a comprehensive survey that will be shared with signatories of the Statement over the next few months….”
“We discover papers and data using open scholarly metadata, targeted text and data mining, and an institution’s internal data sources….
We transparently analyse those papers against all the terms of the institution’s current policy, or custom criteria, to provide detailed statistics and key insights….
We help libraries and funders unlock individual papers as they’re published by making outreach a one-click process, and help build evidence for systemic changes….”
“A group of philanthropic funds and investors led by the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF), with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is today announcing the launch of Global Access Health (GAH), a social enterprise that will seek to expand access to affordable state-of-the-art medical technology through decentralized research, development, and manufacturing in and for the Global South….
The transaction is important in that it transitions a world-class for-profit company into a social enterprise and allows it to entirely reinvest its profits in pursuing these goals. This transformation will give it the ability to address gaps in the provision of global diagnostics in low-income communities and regions that profit-focused business has failed to address….”
“We’re thrilled to announce that OA Works (formerly Open Access Button) has received a grant of $1.9M USD over the next three years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The investment expands OA.Work’s efforts to streamline self-archiving through ShareYourPaper, and forges a new partnership with the foundation to develop tools that help put OA policies into practice. We’re building three new open-source services for the foundation and other institutions, including:
OAreport: to discover, analyze, and unlock papers covered by OA policies.
ShareYourPaper for Funders: to bring drag-and-drop self-archiving to funders and their grantees.
OAsupport: to provide a help desk that serves authors making their work open access….”
“Global-south scientists say that an open-access movement led by wealthy nations deprives them of credit and undermines their efforts….
But a growing faction of scientists, mostly from wealthy nations, argues that sequences should be shared on databases with no gatekeeping at all. They say this would allow huge analyses combining hundreds of thousands of genomes from different databases to flow seamlessly, and therefore deliver results more rapidly.
The debate has caught the attention of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) — which runs its own genome repository, called GenBank — and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has considered encouraging grantees to share on sites without such strong protections, Nature has learnt.
But many researchers — particularly those in resource-limited countries — are pushing back. They tell Nature that they see potential for exploitation in this no-strings-attached approach — and that GISAID’s gatekeeping is one of its biggest attractions because it ensures that users who analyse sequences from GISAID acknowledge those who deposited them. The database also requests that users seek to collaborate with the depositors….
Fears of inequitable data use are amplified by the fact that only 0.3% of COVID-19 vaccines have gone to low-income countries. “Imagine Africans working so hard to contribute to a database that’s used to make or update vaccines, and then we don’t get access to the vaccines,” says Christian Happi, a microbiologist at the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases in Ede, Nigeria. “It’s very demoralizing.” …”
“We are pleased that more authors are choosing to publish with us, hosting the work of 2000 published authors, a third of whom have published at least twice. Since launch, we have published 291 articles and 846 peer review reports, which are all assigned a DOI.
Research Articles remain our most popular peer reviewed article type, representing 48% of the published work. We’ve seen a rise in other article types, publishing more Open Letters and Study Protocols, at 23% and 15% respectively. We see the value in non-traditional article types, and this increase shows how researchers can benefit from the flexibility of communicating research beyond the standard research article, which isn’t necessarily the best or most appropriate format to convey research. Representing a smaller proportion but no less important are Method Articles, Software Tools and Research Notes at 5%, 4% and 2% respectively….”
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Cambia today announced a $2M USD grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support scaling its prominent open knowledge platform, The Lens, as it launches its institutional toolkits to encourage shared evidence and open data to guide partnering and action for science-based problem solving by institutions….”
“As the program manager of knowledge and research at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Farley is part coach, part traffic cop, ensuring that all Gates-funded research is freely available to the public. She is the lead advocate for the Gates’ open access policy, which requires unrestricted access to all research funded by the organization. She oversees a $6 million annual budget that she uses to advocate for open access, ensure that researchers understand and adhere to the policy, and build tools to help them disseminate their work.
In addition to setting policy for the Gates Foundation, Farley frequently gives presentations about open access and is an outspoken advocate for it on Twitter. She sees herself as an educator and motivator, extolling the benefits of publishing research openly….”
“Oxford University surprised and pleased advocates of overhauling the vaccine business in April by promising to donate the rights to its promising coronavirus vaccine to any drugmaker.
The idea was to provide medicines preventing or treating COVID-19 at a low cost or free of charge, the British university said. That made sense to people seeking change. The coronavirus was raging. Many agreed that traditional vaccine development, characterized by long lead times, manufacturing monopolies and weak investment, was broken….
A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices—with the less-publicized potential for Oxford to eventually make millions from the deal and win plenty of prestige….”
“Unfortunately, this siloed approach to research data hasn’t yielded great results. We have only made incremental progress in therapeutics since the late 1990s. There’s a lot that we still don’t know about Alzheimer’s, including what part of the brain breaks down first and how or when you should intervene. But I’m hopeful that will change soon thanks in part to the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative, or ADDI….
I worked with a coalition of partners to create ADDI, because we believe that more data sharing will accelerate progress towards an Alzheimer’s breakthrough. To make this happen, ADDI created the Alzheimer’s Disease workbench.
This workbench hosts an open, global, and easy-to-use set of tools and resources. The goal is to simplify how researchers and data scientists around the world work together and share data, code, and knowledge in order to make advances in the field…..”