blog

The Gates Open Research (GOR) platform, a partner platform with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, marks three years of publication this month. Over this time the platform has grown in popularity and size. In this blog post, Ashley Farley and Hannah Wilson, explore the publishing activity on the GOR platform and look ahead to what we have planned for 2020.

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.

Hannah Wilson is Associate Publisher at F1000Research. Hannah works across the F1000 platforms, focusing in particular on the F1000Research, AAS Open Research and Emerald Open Research platforms. Prior to joining F1000, Hannah worked for a UK-based neuroscience research funder and has a background in biomedical publishing.

The year in numbers

In 2019 we published 121 articles; an increase of almost 60% on the previous year, taking us to a total of 201 publications in total. Since launch, almost 1300 authors have published on the platform and 10% of them have returned to publish at least twice. Our authors come from over 450 different institutions in 57 different countries, representing the platform’s global appeal and ability to reach researchers across the varied programs funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

All peer review comments on the GOR platform are open, available to read and cite. Since launch, we have published 511 peer review comments, all assigned a DOI and attributed to the peer reviewer.

In 2019, 59% of articles published on the GOR platform were Research Articles. Open Letters and Study Protocols are also popular at 17% and 9% respectively. Less common article types such as Method Articles, Data Notes and Software Tools represent a small (6%, 2.5% and 2.5% respectively) but important portion of our 2019 publications and are content types we will be looking to increase awareness of in 2020.

Speed

Articles on Gates Open Research are subject to open, post-publication peer review, allowing rapid publication once rigorous checks have been completed by in-house editorial staff.

The speed at which articles are published on the platform is one of the unique features of GOR. The median time from submission to publication on the platform in 2019 was 28 days. From publication, the average time to receive the first peer review comment was 21 days (median). Once an article has received two “approved” statuses from reviewers (or one “approved” and two “approved with reservation” statuses), articles are submitted for indexing in PubMed and other bibliographic databases. The median time from publication to indexing in 2019 was 63 days, with the total time from submission to indexing a median of 87 days.

Gateways and Collections

A growing area of interest on the GOR platform is the publication of alternative research outputs, such as white papers, contract deliverables and other grey literature. When meeting posters and slidesets are also taken into consideration, over 1500 alternative research outputs have been published since launch.

In 2019 GOR also became the home of Agriknowledge, a collection of agricultural research that had been collected over the years but lacked sustainable funding. This corpus of information will now remain widely available to the research community.

A number of individualized Gateways and Collections have been set up to support specific research areas, events or funded programs in publishing alternative research outputs, in addition to showcasing peer-reviewed articles and links to external content. Some great examples can be found in the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Gateway and the International Conference on Family Planning Gateway.

The year ahead

In 2020 we look forward to connecting with more research groups, programs and events, working with them to support the creation of new Gateways and Collections. The first Gateway of 2020, centred around the work of the World Mosquito Program, has already launched and we hope many more will follow.

In addition to encouraging publication of alternative peer-reviewed article types, in 2020 we will work to encourage researchers to publish negative findings and replication studies. We will also build on our commitment to publishing alternative outputs that do not fit the format of a traditional research article.

As the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a cOAlition S signatory, in 2020 we will be making our pricing structure transparent, ensuring GOR remains a fully Plan S compliant publishing platform.

This month also marks the launch of the new Blog space on GOR. Through regular blog posts and social media support we intend to increase the visibility of the platform and its publications, encouraging conversation around the research being published, in addition to the open publication model itself. You can stay up-to-date with our blog posts and content published on the platform by following our new Twitter account at @GatesOpenRes.

It is important to us that the GOR platform and its services reflects the need of our users. In 2020 we want to engage with more grantees and welcome feedback on the platform, its publications and our blogs. If you’d like to get in touch you can do so on info@gatesopenresearch.org.