Robert Kiley

One of Europe’s biggest science spenders could soon branch out into publishing. The European Commission, which spends more than €10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a “publishing platform” for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe...

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Over the past 20 years, open-access publishing has become a major part of the scholarly landscape. It is now common in astronomy, maths and physics, where most researchers submit their work to the open-access repository arXiv.org before it is published, and is on the rise in the life sciences and other fields....Worldwide, more than 200 institutions and 80 research funders require their researchers' work to be open access, according to the Roarmap registry (roarmap.eprints.org). Read More »

A prototype online platform that uses real-time visualization and viral genome data to track the spread of global pathogens such as Zika and Ebola is the grand prize winner of the Open Science Prize. The international team competition is an initiative by the National Institutes of Health, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). The winning team, Real-time Evolutionary Tracking for Pathogen Surveillance and Epidemiological Investigation, created its nextstrain.org prototype to pool data from researchers across the globe, perform rapid phylogenetic analysis, and post the results on the platform’s website...

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Since 2006, the giant medical-research charity Wellcome Trust has asked the researchers it funds to make their articles free to read online. Last year, it turned up pressure on scientists to comply, or see their funding withheld.

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