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Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust, Two of the World's Largest Biomedical Research Funders, Back Europe's Ambitious Open-Access Plan (nature.com)
Two of the world's largest biomedical research funders have backed a plan to make all papers resulting from work they fund open access on publication by 2020. From a report: On 5 November, the London-based Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, announced they were both endorsing 'Plan S,' adding their weight to an initiative already backed by 13 research funders across Europe since its launch in September. The plan was spearheaded by Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission's special envoy on open access. The Wellcome Trust, which gave out $1.4 billion in grants in 2016-17, is also the first funder to detail how it intends to implement Plan S. Its approach suggests that journals may not need to switch wholesale to open-access (OA) models by 2020 to be compliant with Plan S -- if the initiative's other backers decide on a similar line.
The biomedical charity already has an OA policy, but in some cases it allows an embargo of up to six months after publication before papers have to be made free to read. The organization says that by 1 January 2020, it will ban all such embargoes. Wellcome-funded work will not be able to appear in Nature, Science and other influential subscription journals unless these publications permit Wellcome-funded papers to be published under OA terms. Researchers that the charity funds could still publish in subscription journals, says Robert Kiley, Wellcome's head of open research. But only if those journals agree that the authors can immediately deposit their accepted manuscript in the PubMed Central repository under a liberal publishing licence. Some publishers, such as the Royal Society in London, already allow this.
The biomedical charity already has an OA policy, but in some cases it allows an embargo of up to six months after publication before papers have to be made free to read. The organization says that by 1 January 2020, it will ban all such embargoes. Wellcome-funded work will not be able to appear in Nature, Science and other influential subscription journals unless these publications permit Wellcome-funded papers to be published under OA terms. Researchers that the charity funds could still publish in subscription journals, says Robert Kiley, Wellcome's head of open research. But only if those journals agree that the authors can immediately deposit their accepted manuscript in the PubMed Central repository under a liberal publishing licence. Some publishers, such as the Royal Society in London, already allow this.
[Why] don't we have THAT as an economy, rather than one chasing pointless money numbers going up.
Feel free to sell all of your possessions and contribute the proceeds to the betterment of humanity at any time. You might be able to look up and see someone in the top 1% of the western world who is wealthy beyond your imagination and wonder why he or she isn't more gregarious, but keep in mind that there's a whole world beneath you that's looking up and from their perspective you're as much a part of that top 1% as is everyone above you. Once you realize that you are the rich man, it becomes a little more difficult to act yourself as you wish others to do. Something, something, needle, camel.
The whole current economy is desperately missing a purpose, IMHO.
Here's where you're lacking understanding and why reality does not reflect your desires. The economy exists to direct the use of limited resources. There isn't automatically enough food, cars, televisions, etc. for everyone to have as much as they want. All of those things must be produced, typically using other resources (oil, aluminium, labor, etc.) that are in turn limited and could be used for a variety of different ends.
It doesn't matter whether you have a laissez-faire free market economy or one that is entirely centrally planned where all activities are directed by a monolithic entity, the purpose remains the same. You might think that the latter approach would be a good thing if only someone like you got to be in control of it, but history suggests that it's the same kind of psychopaths one often finds at the top of corporations that seize this power, often to disastrous ends.