World Health Organization Joins cOAlition S/Plan S to Support Free and Immediate Access to Health Research

From cOAlition S/Plan S:

Today the World Health Organization (WHO) announces it is the first of the United Nations agencies to join the growing coalition of research funders and charitable foundations who implement Plan S. This commitment will ensure that all WHO supported health research will be free to read online on the day it is published.

TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, a global programme of scientific collaboration that helps facilitate, support, and influence efforts to combat diseases of poverty will also join cOAlition S alongside WHO. TDR is hosted at WHO, and is sponsored by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, and WHO.

“WHO champions the right of everybody to access quality health care services, and our support for Open Access to the health research that underpins that care goes hand-in-hand with that commitment,” said WHO Chief Scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan. “By joining this coalition, we believe we can accelerate progress towards universal free access to health research – an ambition that supports our current strategy of one billion more people benefiting from universal health coverage over the next five years.”

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Today, there is a growing number of Open Access publishing platforms where authors can ensure their works are widely available. TDR, one of the research programmes within the WHO’s new Science Division, has developed one such Open Access publishing platform. TDR Gateway provides greater opportunities to TDR-supported researchers to publish the results of their work and to make them available to the public for free.

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Filed under: News, Open Access, Publishing