To fulfill America's humanitarian obligations as a member of the international community and to invest in the nation's long-term health, economic interests, and national security, the United States should reaffirm and increase its commitment to improving the health of developing nations....
The study was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Google.org, Merck Company Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Department of State.
From Chapter 3:
Recommendation:
3-3. The U.S. research community should promote global knowledge networks and the open exchange of information and tools that enable local problem solvers to conduct research to improve the health of their own populations.
Funders of global health research should require that all work supported by them will appear in public digital libraries, preferably at the time of publication and without constraints of copyright (through open access publishing), but no later than six months after publication in traditional subscription-based journals. Universities and other research institutions should foster compliance with such policies from funding agencies and supplement those policies with institution-based repositories of publications and databases....
From Appendix F (by Anthony So and Evan Stewart):
...To ensure greater access to scientific publications, several strategies have been deployed. One has involved tiered pricing, and the other, the pooling of published research in open access journals or repositories....
Across disciplines ranging from electrical engineering to mathematics, the free, on-line access of journal articles corresponded to higher mean citation rates. Several studies suggest that open access articles have a higher citation rate than closed-access articles. This held true even when comparing open-access articles compared to non-open-access articles in the same journal. Importantly, the impact of open access publication on citations in journal publications was twice as strong in the developing world....
Several prominent medical research funders have made open access a condition of grant support....
The sharing of research data and materials enables the scientific community to confirm study findings and also to build upon the work of others. Access to these building blocks of research, however, may also be encumbered for reasons similar to those encountered over scientific publications. The difference is that access to data and materials enriches immensely the pursuit of new hypotheses that derive or go substantially beyond its original research use....
As with publications, open access may also multiply the impact of research data. For example, in a 2007 study of 85 cancer microarray clinical trial publications, the public sharing of available data contributed to a 69% increase in citations. While half the trials in the study made their data publicly available, they comprised 85% of the total citations....
[T]he willingness of some funders and even some universities to support upfront fees for publication in open access journals is a promising step in this direction, perhaps one that might be emulated when patenting to protect public access is at stake [by paying the transaction costs of patent pooling]....
Yet arguably if publicly funded research were not freely available, the taxpayers would have paid for the results several times over—grants for the academic research, salaries for those academics giving their time for peer review, and subscriptions for such journals....
This calculus of “pay now or pay more later” might guide where the public ought to direct its investments to maximize the returns to the health care system. For example, in the value chain of scientific journal publication, paying the publication fees for open access journals is one way of supporting a business model that encourages the sharing of knowledge. Going further, the U.S. government could develop a system of supporting open access journals that publish peer-reviewed, publicly funded research. For those open access journals that charge publication fees, it could build support into the direct or indirect cost structure of grants. For those open access journals that do not charge fees, it could provide direct or indirect subsidies. Either way, it could support journals that provide open access rather than impose subscription fees on patients, providers and universities....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
