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Following in the footsteps – Ashley Farley, Associate Officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, talks about the foundation’s open research journey, and its first steps into open access to providing its grantees with an alternative to the traditional journal.  

Ashley Farley is an Associate Program Officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In this capacity she leads the foundation’s Open Access Policy implementation and associated initiatives (now including cOAlition S/Plan S alignment). This includes overseeing the work of Gates Open Research, a transparent and revolutionary publishing platform. Other core activities involve supporting the strategic and operational aspects of the foundation’s library, fulfilling program staff research needs. This work has sparked a passion for open access, believing that open knowledge has the power to improve and save lives.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched it’s Open Access policy in 2015 marking a point where we joined a global effort to prioritize open access to research knowledge with aims to accelerate finding solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. The Wellcome Trust first partnered with F1000 to launch Wellcome Open Research and they shared their experience with the foundation (see the story here). Intrigued by the F1000 model, the foundation followed in Wellcome’s footsteps to launch it’s own open platform for it’s grantees. It has been one of my favourite initiatives associated with the foundation’s open access work. As a librarian, it is part of my ethos to help people access the information they need and to ensure quality information is widely available to all. 

Thoughtful conversations 

Gates Open Research has enabled our grantees to disseminate their research results quickly and openly to their communities and the larger global community. Such rapid and transparent publishing is especially critical during public health emergencies, as is seen in the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Over the years the model has empowered grantees to easily and painlessly share their findings, no matter what they are. Readers are able to see the peer-review process and feedback, giving them the best opportunity to assess the validity and impact of the work. Authors have been known to produce multiple versions to incorporate peer review feedback, even if this is not required to reach an accepted publication. This demonstrates that authors care about getting the research right and that research is more of a conversation than a one and done publication. 

Knowledge sharing 

In socializing Gates Open Research, I had the opportunity to learn the needs of foundation program staff and grantees in sharing knowledge artifacts that do not fall into the traditional article. Much of these outputs would not be considered “novel” enough for traditional journals but are quite important and relevant to the grantees’ community. Thus, a year after the initial launch we decided to explore the hosting of non-peer reviewed artifacts. This type of knowledge sharing quickly took off and had a broader audience than predicted as there was a huge appetite to share documents, slides, and conference posters. This adds value to the activities that led to the creation of these artifacts that would otherwise have been fleeting or lost in an email inbox. 

I am excited to begin wider communications for Gates Open Research to share the foundation’s experiences with a radial and future-focusing publishing model. 

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