What is Chronos Hub?

Chronos Hub is a service for Gates-funded researchers co-developed by the foundation. Chronos Hub simplifies and manages the process of publishing under the foundation's Open Access Policy terms.

We want grantees and employees to focus on the research – not the process of publishing research.

How does Chronos Hub work?

• Gates-funded researchers and Gates employees use this service to help manage the open access publishing process. They are able to search for journals offering open access options and submit their articles directly to the publisher. Chronos Hub takes care of publisher payment processing, the foundation's compliancy checks, and tracking publishing activity along with its impact. For a closer look, watch the video walk-through.

How do grantees and Gates Foundation employees access Chronos Hub?

• Grantees:
  • For agreements signed on or after January 1, 2015, the primary grantee contact will receive a Chronos Hub account activation email 6 weeks after the agreement start date. Primary contacts can add team members, such as subgrantees and administrators, who will receive a Chronos Hub account activation email and have permission to submit articles under the grant.
  • For agreements signed prior to January 1, 2015, grantees can go to Chronos Hub and click Request Gates Grantee Access.
  • For institutional research administrators, email openaccess@gatesfoundation.org to request access to all grants awarded to your institution. Upon approval, you will receive a Chronos Hub account activation email.

• Gates Foundation Employees: Go to Chronos Hub and click Request Gates Employee Access.

What if an accepted article was not submitted through Chronos Hub?

• The foundation requires that all articles are submitted through Chronos Hub beginning August 2016. If an article was in peer-review prior to the launch of Chronos Hub and has been accepted for publication, email your Gates Foundation grant number, the journal's name, manuscript number, and article title to support@chronos-oa.com. You will receive a Chronos Hub account and the Chronos Hub support team will work with you to ensure the publication meets the policy's terms and manage the payment process directly with the publisher.

What is Gates Open Research?

Gates Open Research publishes scholarly articles reporting any basic scientific, translational, applied and clinical research (including quantitative and qualitative studies) that has been funded (or co-funded) by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Each publication must have at least one author who has been, or still is, a recipient of a Gates Foundation grant.

Articles must be original (not duplications). All research, including clinical trials, systematic reviews, software tools, method articles, and many others, is welcome and will be published irrespective of the perceived level of interest or novelty; confirmatory and negative results, as well as null studies are all suitable. See the full list of article types here.

All articles are published using a fully transparent, author-driven model: the authors are solely responsible for the content of their article. Invited peer review takes place openly after publication, and the authors play a crucial role in ensuring that the article is peer-reviewed by independent experts in a timely manner. Articles that pass peer review will be indexed in PubMed and elsewhere.

Gates Open Research is an Open Research platform: all articles are published open access under a CC-BY license; the publishing and peer-review processes are fully transparent; and authors are asked to include detailed descriptions of methods and to provide full and easy access to source data underlying the results to improve reproducibility.

How does publishing in Gates Open Research work?

All submissions to Gates Open Research are made via Chronos Hub. Authors can begin their submission to Gates Open Research either from the Submit your Research page, from where they will be directed to Chronos Hub, or from the Chronos Hub site, by choosing Gates Open Research from the list of approved journals.

There will be no charge for authors. All publishing costs will be covered directly by the Gates Foundation, which will pay the service provider, F1000, a fixed charge (between $150 and $1000) per published article. F1000 will provide editorial, production and administrative support to authors throughout the publication and post-publication peer review process.

Why is Gates Open Research only available to Gates Foundation grantees and employees?

The Gates Foundation is providing this platform to its grantees so they can easily comply with the foundation’s Open Access Policy. By using Gates Open Research, grantees can make their funded research available as soon as it is ready, undergo open peer review, increase the speed with which research is disseminated and enable the sharing of results across the scientific community.

For more information visit the Gates Open Research homepage.

The Open Access Policy requires that data underlying published research results will be accessible and open immediately.

The following guidelines focus on data underlying published research. Activities around pre-publication data planning, collection, analysis, storage, sovereignty, informed consent, interoperability, and the use of disciplinary standards are addressed at the individual grant and contract level by the grantee and program officer during the proposal stage.

These guidelines are aligned with existing industry best practices, including data availability policies required by several publishers. As new practices emerge, the guidelines will be reviewed and updated as needed.

What is underlying data?

Underlying data encompasses all primary data, associated metadata, and any additional relevant data necessary to understand, assess, and replicate the reported study findings in totality.

Underlying data can be compiled into any file type, including any necessary access instructions, code, or supporting information files, to ensure the file(s) can be accessed and used by others.

Note: We do not require sharing of data that is ethically unsound or legally encumbered.

Why is access to underlying data important?

Providing access to underlying data is key in fulfilling the foundation’s mission of rapid and free exchange of scientific ideas to move humanity forward by improving and saving lives. Without barriers the scientific community can freely benefit from data and build upon each other’s work.

Access to underlying data allows for:

• Barrier-free and timely access to data
• Reassessment of current data interpretations and analysis
• Ability to verify, reproduce, and reuse data in new ways
• Data provenance and preservation

Where should grantees deposit data?

Best practice: Deposit data in a repository already established for your research domain according to the recognized standards of your discipline. Required or suggested repositories are often identified within a journal’s author guidelines.

For data related to publication in Gates Open Research see these Data Guidelines for more information.

For further suggestions, see:

• Re3data.org’s Registry of Research Data Repositories
• PLoS’s Recommended Data Repositories
• Scientific Data’s Recommended Data Repositories

When no established repository is available: Deposit data in your institutional research data repository or in a generalist repository, such as:

• Dataverse – an open source web application developed by Harvard University to share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data.
• Dryad – a curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable.
• Figshare – a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable, and discoverable manner.
• Zenodo – a repository developed and hosted by CERN that enables researchers to share and preserve research outputs in any size, any format, and from any science.

How should grantees make data accessible and open?

The repository you choose should:

• Enable immediate open access to the underlying data upon publication of your article.
• Allow reuse with licensing no more restrictive than Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0).
• Assign your dataset with a persistent and unique identifier, such as a DOI (digital object identifier) to facilitate linking and citation.
• Provide long-term storage and preservation, such as those that meet the ISO’s trustworthy digital repository standards.

How does the foundation ensure compliance with this element of the Open Access Policy?

The foundation checks and tracks compliancy through Chronos Hub, a new service to help you manage the process of publishing under the policy’s terms.

How can grantees get support for the process of depositing my underlying data?

Technical assistance and user support is provided by the specific repository; visit their website for further information.

Updated January 1, 2017

What is the Open Science Leadership Forum?

In October 2017, thought-leaders from around the globe gathered at an Open Science Leadership Forum in the Washington DC offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to share their views on what successful Open Science (OS) looks like. Delegates from developed and developing nations, national governments, science agencies and funding bodies, philanthropy, researchers, patient organizations and the biotechnology, pharma and artificial intelligence (AI) industries discussed the outcomes that would rally them to invest in OS, as well as wider issues of policy and implementation.

The Leadership Forum was the first of a multi-step process to develop a ‘toolbox’ of practical and transparent indicators for assessing where and when OS models of collaboration best advance science, innovation and public benefit. This project was inspired by the recent adoption of a broad institution-wide OS policy at the Montreal Neurological Institute (the Neuro), Canada’s leading center for neuroscience research and patient care.

What are the outcomes of this forum?

A report: Defining Success in Open Science outlines the success outcomes defined by the Leadership Forum participants. These are organized by theme, each comprising of a brief summary of the relevant discussion, with a list of the corresponding success outcomes, including scientific, clinical, social and economic factors.

What happens next?

Another meeting will take place in late Spring 2018 at the Wellcome Trust’s London offices. The work will focus on translating success outcomes into indicators. We anticipate that these indicators will include both quantitative and qualitative measures, and will lead to the development of a toolkit consisting of indicators, a code-book of how to assess them, survey templates, and qualitative methods that we anticipate disseminating in 2019.