Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has signed up for BioMed Central Membership under which HHMI will centrally fund the article processing charges for all research published by HHMI investigators in BioMed Central journals. The agreement will take effect from September 1st, 2007.
2nd largest biomedical funder in the U.S. and commits more than $500 million a
year for research and distributes $80 million in grant support for science
education. This agreement comes soon after HHMI announced their open access policy, which requires that results of research funded by HHMI investigators must be deposited in PubMed Central. This agreement with BioMed Central reinforces HHMI’s ongoing commitment to open access to maximize the impact and visibility of the research that they fund and is a big step in the right direction for providing sustainable funding for open access publishing.
HHMI-funded researchers already publish a signficant number of research articles with BioMed Central, paid for directly out of investigators funds. View some of the latest open access research published by HHMI-funded researchers in BioMed Central journals. Generally, when insitutions set up a Membership arrangement with BioMed Central, removing the burden of payment from investigators grants, this results in a significant increase in submissions, and we would expect the same to be true in the case of HHMI Membership.
Congratulations! Another big step for BMC and for Open Access.
Some of the Howard Hughes investigators are at Yale – a bit of irony.
(I found the story in the emailed afternoon update from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/20.)
– Bob
Indeed very heartening to learn this move of HHMI. This will be more than an eye opener for some of the Indian Scientists (specially those with a capacity to influence funding decisions, recruitments and awards etc.), who are still debating BMC journals as a first choice for Indian bio-scientists to publish.