Research4Life has enabled free or low-cost access to scholarly publications in over 125 low and middle-income countries for the past 20 years. This collaboration has helped to reduce the knowledge gap for tens of thousands of researchers, but there is evidence that those same researchers experience significant barriers when it comes to publishing their own work, and that the shift to Open Access has created new kinds of obstacles.  In July 2020 Research4Life established an Open Access Task Force to investigate ways in which the partnership could support an equitable transition to OA and to inform its future strategic direction. Outputs from the Task Force will be described, including the Best Practice Guidelines for publishers on how to communicate APC waiver policies, an online index to publishers’ inclusion policies and feedback and suggestions from our target community via a webinar presentation of our work and an online survey of Research4Life user institutions.  This survey aimed to identify key challenges and ways in which the Research4Life partnership can extend its scope to support lower income country users as producers of research outputs and not just as consumers of the work of others.

Practical steps to achieving an equitable transition to open access – recommendations from the Research4Life OA task force

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.