FEATURING
Ashley Farley, Program Officer for Knowledge and Research Services, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Charlotte Watts, Chief Scientific Adviser and Director for Research and Evidence at the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)
Elizabeth Marincola, Open Science Senior Advisor, Science for Africa Foundation
Justice Nonvignon, Head of Health Economics and Financing, Africa Centers for Disease Control
MODERATING
Tom Drake, Senior Policy Analyst, CGD
*Including an announcement of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 2025 Open Access policy refresh*
Research publishing is more important and more broken than most people realise. In 2022, the five biggest research publishers made only 31 percent of their articles Open Access (without paywall) and only 25 percent of their journals were fully Open Access. This means that those without the means to pay vast sums in subscriptions, including governments, researchers, civil society organisations and the general public cannot always access the latest evidence, with implications for policy, innovation and trust in scientific advances. Two decades of Open Access initiatives have seen insufficient change to this foundational global system.
Recognising this critical challenge, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a longstanding champion of Open Access, will announce an important policy refresh to what research outputs they will require (and pay for) as a major research funder.
In this panel event, Ashley Farley from the Gates foundation will outline the refreshed policy and be joined by leading experts and champions of research publishing reform. The panel will explore the multifaceted nature of the problem, delving into challenges faced by researchers working in Africa; government’s role in research publishing; strategies to reform the system to work towards effective, efficient, and equitable research publishing; and why research publishing should be at the forefront of the global agenda.
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