To mark National Public Health WeekSimon Linacre analyzes how a combination of pressure from Open access movement and commitment to open research It has allowed a greater amount of medical research to be accessible to the public.
Last week, one of the world’s largest charitable organizations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundationchanged his Open access policy. In an important change, he decreed that since 2025 he would no longer finance the positions for the processing of articles of the authors (APC) to be published in open access magazines. On the other hand, it will order the authors to put their articles available as ‘pre -prinitions’, which are available to read for all, but do not require any rate to publish online in a repository.
Clearly, this movement is designed to take advantage of making medical research openly accessible, as well as capturing the frustration that many share not to discover key information on medical problems potentially life or death, whether it is due to The payment walls. In articles, or sometimes strong APCs that are loaded. It was these advantages and frustrations that resulted in the open access movement (OA) that was formed in the 1990s, and as we detailed here last year fed the growth of OA during the last quarter of a century.
But while we celebrate National Public Health Week and World Health Day On April 7, what has been the impact of OA to open the investigation to the general public?
Transformed research
The articles backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) constitute a considerable body of texts in medical literature, according to DimensionsIn 2023 there were 4,494 publications that recognized the financing of the Foundation, which appeared in magazines published by main editors such as Elsevier (855 articles funded by BMGF), Springer Nature (780) and Wiley (347). While there is already a substantial number of articles published in the main magazines funded by BMGF, and the new mandate does not seem to prevent them from being published in such magazines after publication as pre -primpressions, we can see some changes as a result of the first political pre -printing ‘ .
Change our approach to look back in how health research as BGMF have been made available to everyone as open access items, we can see in the table below that there has been a marked increase in the amount of medical research which is now openly accessible in the last 20 years or so. And significantly, we can also see this using the Free web application of dimensions.
In 2003 there were 1.66 million articles publications, according to Dimensions, with only a quarter of them available as open access items. We can see in the table that some of the main health categories confirmed a considerable number of these OA articles in 2003, which were only three years after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was formed for the first time.
Fast advance 10 years, and medical research had begun to be transformed into terms of accessibility to the public. In 2013, 3.1 million articles were published, of which 1.3 million, or 42%, were now OA. When observing health research specifically, the percentages were much greater as the adoption in these fields exceeded others: in biomedical and clinical sciences, 48% of the articles were OA, in clinical sciences it was 45% and in Biological sciences was already more than half to 57% to 57%.
Greater acceleration in the adoption of open access in the last decade has seen that the accessibility of health research grows even more. The total number of published articles has not only increased by more than 50%, but the proportion of articles in medical research that is open access are more than 60%, and almost 70%in the case of biological sciences.
New perspectives
Since its inception, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made subsidy payments for a total of more than $ 71 billion to support gender equality, global development and global health programs. Its objective has been to create a world in which each individual has the opportunity to lead a healthy and productive life, and can see for their commitment to OA that considers that access to the most current research is part of that mission. As we reflect and celebrate the National Week of Public Health and World Health Day, it is clear how important access to data in supporting the unattended communities to take advantage of the benefits that access to health research brings . For more information on how research impacts society, see our last TL campaign; DR on research transformation.
About the author
Simon LinacreContent Manager, Brand & Press | Digital science
Simon has 20 years of experience in academic communications. He has given conferences and published on the issues of the Bibliometry, the ethics of the publication and the impact of the research, and has recently written a book on predatory publications. Simon is an ALPSP tutor and has also served as COPE trustee.
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