Growing recognition of the need to share research findings

First India's CSIR, then CGIAR's ICRISAT network and now South Africa's University of Pretoria have recently adopted (or in the case of CSIR, strongly recommended) a requirement for their researchers to make all publications arising from their work openly accessable to all. These institutional mandates show a recognition by developing/emerging country organisations that for their research to become part of the global knowledge base and accelerate the rate of finding solutions to urgent problems, free access to their research output is essential.

This news comes just as new charts showing the growth of world-wide open access mandates has been published by Alma Swan on her blog, Optimal Scholarship. The chart of half-yearly increases, shown below, clearly indicates that a better understanding of the need for sharing research information is taking place, and developing countries are joining Harvard, MIT, Wellcome Trust, and over 80 other seats of learning in accelerating the speed of research distribution and thus making best use of funding. For a full list of open access policies, see the ROARmap database.