Biophysical Society Bulletin | October 2021

Public Affairs

https:/www.biophysics.org/Policy-Advocacy/Take-Action or contact Leann Fox at LFox@biophysics.org. — Jonathan King and Eric Sundberg , Biophysical Society Public Affairs Committee Around theWorld Afghan Researchers Fear for Their Safety Following the Taliban’s recent lightning-fast takeover of Af- ghanistan, many scientists are trying to flee the anti-science regime. After the Taliban’s ouster in 2001 at the start of the U.S.-led invasion, the country’s higher education institutions burgeoned from a handful to more than 100, and women entered the workforce en masse. Leaders of the Taliban insist they have moderated their views, but few Afghans are willing to take those reassurances at face value. European and U.S. officials have scrambled to get hundreds of Afghan scholars and their families onto flights out of Kabul. However, reaching the airport meant running a gauntlet of Taliban fighters roam- ing Kabul’s streets and passing several checkpoints. Scientists stranded outside the capital have said it was too dangerous to travel to Kabul in the final days of the U.S. military pres- ence. For now, though, many U.S. institutions are trying to protect former collaborators by purging their websites and social me- dia accounts of any mention of past cooperation, for fear of retaliation against those individuals by the Taliban. In addition, they are coordinating with Biden administration officials and Congress on how to steer scholars to safe harbors. Major U.K. Science Funder to Require Grantees toMake Papers Immediately Free The United Kingdom currently has one of the highest rates of open access publication in the world, with many researchers posting their research papers on websites that make them publicly available for free. But the country’s leading funding agency, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), announced a new policy that will push open access even further by mandating that all research it funds must be freely available for anyone to read upon publication. UKRI will expand on existing rules covering all research papers produced from its £8 billion in annual funding. About three quarters of papers recently published from U.K. universities are open access, and UKRI’s current policy gives scholars

two routes to comply: pay journals for “gold” open access, which makes a paper free to read on the publisher’s website immediately, or choose the “green” route, which allows them to deposit a near-final version of the paper on a public reposi- tory, after a waiting period of up to one year. Some publishers have insisted that an embargo period is necessary to prevent the free papers from peeling away their subscribers. However, starting in April 2022, that year-long delay will no longer be permitted: researchers choosing green open access must deposit the paper immediately when it is published. And publishers won’t be able to hang on to the copyright for UKRI-funded papers. The agency will require that the research it funds—with some minor exceptions—be pub- lished with a Creative Commons Attribution license (known as CC-BY) that allows for free and liberal distribution of the work. The policy falls closely in line with those issued by other major research funders, including the nonprofit Wellcome Trust and the European Research Council. UKRI says it will unveil more details of the policy in Novem- ber. It has not yet said, for example, whether it will fund gold open access fees for journals that have made some open access commitments but are not covered by a full transition- al agreement approved by Jisc, a nonprofit U.K. group that negotiates journal subscriptions on behalf of universities. Some publishers have resisted the new requirements. The Publishers Association, a member organization for the U.K. publishing industry, circulated a document saying the policy would introduce confusion for researchers, threaten their academic freedom, undermine open access, and leave many researchers on the hook for fees for gold open access—which it calls the only viable route for researchers.

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