The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will require grant recipients to publish articles in the public domain.

Bill and Melinda Gates fund a large amount of global health research. The foundation itself spends tens of millions of dollars to support research authors. Now this organization is changing the rules for supporting researchers. In particular, since 2017, grantees are obliged to publish their articles in the public domain.

Until that time, authors who received funding from the fund may publish their articles in scientific journals providing materials on a fee basis. But the author must ensure that his work will be published in the public domain after 12 months.
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After 12 months, the journal should open access to work. At the same time, the text of the study is available to everyone, both for distribution and for use by other researchers. Actually, the text should be published under the license of ' Creative Commons '. Well, since 2017 all the works of the authors whose research is financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, should be published immediately in the public domain, without any restrictions.

Such a policy of the Foundation is much more stringent than the rules of most other funds, which allow their authors to publish articles in journals with a paid subscription to readers, with the condition of publishing materials in open access in six months or a year. It is worth noting that there are too many scientific journals that publish the articles of the authors in the public domain. Such journals charge a fee from the authors for the publication of material. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will also pay this contribution.

The Gates Foundation’s initiative was highly appreciated by some experts, for example, the executive director of the SPARC advocacy group, Open Access Policy from Washington.

The fund spends about $ 900 million annually to support research on global health issues. In a year, authors funded by the foundation publish about 1,400 materials, only 30% of which appear in journals with open access to materials.