“One of the world’s richest biomedical research organizations, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), announced on 1 October that it will require scientists it funds to make papers open access (OA) as soon as they are published — a change to its current policy, which allows a delay of up to one year before results must be free to read.

The non-profit organization, based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, is only the second US funder to insist on immediate open access, after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. As part of the policy change, HHMI has joined the coalition of funders and organizations behind Plan S, a European-led initiative that is pushing for research to be immediately accessible on publication, and is supported by national research agencies and charitable organizations such as the Wellcome Trust and the Gates foundation. The HHMI’s shift is a boost to Plan S, and having more US-based funders on board will help build momentum towards open access, says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The HHMI spent US$763 million on biomedical research in 2019 and supports around 4,750 researchers, producing around 2,500 papers a year. Its new policy states that from 2022, HHMI scientists must either publish papers OA or deposit their accepted manuscripts in a repository openly under a liberal publishing licence….”

“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), one of the largest research philanthropies, said today it will begin to require its scientists to make research papers in which they played a leading role immediately free to read. HHMI now requires open access within 12 months of publica­tion.

After the policy takes effect in January 2022, the move could block the institute’s scientists, who include some of the biggest names in biomedical research, from publishing in top-tier, subscription-only journals such as Cell, Nature, and Science. Work by more than 4700 staff members, including 256 investigators and nearly 1700 postdoctoral researchers at laboratories across the United States, could be affected, HHMI says. But if elite journals continue to join the movement toward open-access publishing, HHMI authors may gain new options for compliance….”

“cOAlition S is excited to welcome the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) as the newest organisation to join cOAlition S, a consortium of research funding and performing organisations committed to delivering full and immediate Open Access to scientific publications.

Advocating for broader immediate access to published scientific research, the HHMI announced today, October 1, 2020, significant changes to its publishing policy. The new policy, which aligns with the principles of Plan S,  will take effect on January 1, 2022, and will require all HHMI laboratory heads to publish in a manner that makes their research articles freely available on the day of publication under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY).

HHMI is the largest private biomedical research institution in the United States, spending more than $750 million annually on basic biomedical research and employing more than 2,300 employees. By launching its new policy, HHMI joins forces with cOAlition S organisations in the drive towards full and immediate open access publishing….”

“Advocating for broader immediate access to published scientific research, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) today announced significant changes to its publishing policy. The new policy, which will take effect on January 1, 2022, will require all HHMI laboratory heads to publish in a manner that makes their research articles freely available on the publication date under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

HHMI’s policy outlines the new requirements and a number of options that HHMI scientists have to meet this open access mandate. The goal of the policy is to ensure that when HHMI research is published, it is shared with immediate open access and without restrictions on subsequent use, enabling others to build on the work to accelerate discovery….

The new policy is HHMI’s latest step in its efforts over two decades to influence and catalyze important changes in scientific publishing that foster greater access to scientific outputs. In 2003, HHMI hosted a key meeting in which the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing was drafted, leading to an early working definition of open access publication in the life sciences and biomedicine. In 2007, HHMI became one of the first research organizations in the United States to adopt a public access publishing policy. Four years later, in 2011, the Institute joined with Wellcome and the Max Planck Institute in creating the open access journal eLife. More recently, the Institute has advocated for more transparent and community-driven publishing practices, including the use of preprints as a means of making scientific research freely available and faster. It has also changed its guidelines to allow HHMI scientists to include preprints among the published research articles they submit when they undergo scientific review….”