Survey of biomedical funders shows widespread support for open access

BioMed Central today released the results of its international survey of 75 biomedical funders on their policies regarding open access to the results of research. The survey confirms that there is strong support by funders for moves to increase access to the results of research, through open access publishing and open access archiving.

Summary of survey findings:

• 33 funders responded to the survey (or had already made their policies on open access publicly available)
• 31 funders have confirmed that they are willing to fund article processing charges for open access publication
• 16 funders are signatories of one of the major international declarations in support of open access
• 15 funders have an official policy in support of open access
• 11 of these official funder policies either encourage or require funding recipients to deposit all resulting research articles in an open access repository

Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central's Publisher, commented: "It is very encouraging to see a growing number of funders expressing official support for open access, and confirming that they will make funds available to allow authors to publish in open access journals. Many of the funders we contacted as part of the survey indicated that, while they did not yet have an official policy in support of open access, it was an issue that they were actively working on. We hope that publication of this comparison table of funder policies will encourage even more funders to define official policies on open access."

BioMed Central's summary of funder policies on open access is available here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/funderpolicies