Sharing may be essential, but ensuring that it occurs is no simple matter when academic and commercial interests collide or when colleagues simply decline to supply research materials because they lack the time, resources, or interest. We recognize that HHMI investigators experience many frustrations in living up to this policy. They tell us that preparing mice and other reagents is time-consuming, that many researchers don't reciprocate, that it can be difficult to gain access to a computer program's source code, and that many barriers limit the sharing of derivatives created from someone else's material. We have a number of initiatives under way aimed at alleviating the burden on HHMI investigators and facilitating sharing.

One example is a collaborative agreement with the Jackson Laboratory that ultimately should streamline the process of sharing mouse strains developed by HHMI scientists with other laboratories. Although we have no ready-made solutions for encouraging greater acceptance of the upside of UPSIDE outside HHMI, we are giving thought to the ways in which intellectual property policies writ large may impede the ability of scientists to share reagents, tools, and data. Stay tuned.

True science—to borrow once again from Max Perutz—also benefits when research articles are freely available after publication. As an extension of our commitment to the free distribution of research materials, the Institute is actively considering a policy that would require our scientists to publish original research articles only in those journals that make the articles freely available within six months through PubMed Central, the repository maintained by the National Library of Medicine. Toward that end, we have spent the past several months consulting with HHMI investigators, journal publishers and editors, scientific societies, and international colleagues. The conversations have been lively, energetic, and always instructive. Recently, we reached an agreement with Elsevier under which we will pay to have manuscripts by HHMI scientists in Elsevier and Cell Press publications deposited directly into PubMed Central after six months. We expect other agreements to follow.

Currently, only the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom requires its grantees to publish in journals that make content freely available within six months. Although the National Institutes of Health has established a voluntary policy for its grantees, the number of papers deposited in PubMed Central has fallen short of what many had envisioned. We hope that HHMI's policy will enable public access without sacrificing the important principles that underlie scholarly freedom. This matters not only because our scientists produce more than 1,000 original research articles a year and collaborate with colleagues from around the world but also because our approach may contribute to a new uniform standard for public access to scientific publications. After all, if the scientific community requires UPSIDE for published materials, databases, and software, there is certainly an additional upside to making the publications themselves readily available.

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