Life Sciences

In medicine and the life sciences, open access is particularly supported by mandates from research funders such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Wellcome Trust, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Calls for free access to the results of research in medicine and the life sciences refer to the direct link between open access and public health, especially in the global South. Consequently, the World Health Organization (WHO) is also committed to promoting open access to the results of medical research, and operates IRIS, a repository for information sharing. Some research funders also provide publication platforms on which the results of the research that they fund can be published. Examples of such platforms include Wellcome Open Research and Gates Open Research. To comply with funding requirements, the published results of NIH-funded research must be made accessible on PubMed Central (PMC), the disciplinary repository for biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the NIH National Library of Medicine.

Many of the "born open access" journals in the life sciences that were founded in the 2010s are now well established. Journals such as PeerJ, BMJ Open, Cell Reports, and eLife focus exclusively on this domain. 

In addition, since around 2016, preprint servers have increasingly played a role in making the results of research in medicine and the life sciences available in open access at an early stage. They include, for example, bioRxiv and medRxiv, which have a life science focus (further preprint servers can be found in the pre­print server directory provided by ASAPbio). During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints in medicine have gained increased importance for the rapid dissemi­nation of research results. However, criticism of the publication of preprints has also been voiced, because results were available before undergoing quality control through peer review and the media picked up these unreviewed results and treated them as scientific facts.

As of April 2024, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) listed over 11,399 titles under the search string "Life Science" OR Medicine, and the OAPEN Library listed 332 titles under the search term medical. 

As scholarly communication in medicine and life sciences takes place for the most part via journal publications, open access books are not at the forefront of discussion in this domain. Larger publishers with a medical or life science focus and a portfolio of open access journals usually also offer open access book programmes whereby books can be published in open access against payment of a book processing charge (BPC).

While most programmes are still strongly geared towards printed books, a small number of initiatives promote purely electronic implementation, particularly with a view to exploiting the advantages of a digital environment and enhancing publications with multi-media content such as videos or audio files (Breure et al., 2011; Bardi & Manghi, 2014) or with links to further materials. They include, for example, the Living Handbooks programme offered by ZB MED – Informa­tion Centre for Life Sciences, which focuses particularly on handbooks.

Because of the immense importance of medical and life science information for society, there are numerous initiatives which further the opening of the research cycle in this domain, and especially to facilitate access to and reuse of research data. Information on research data in medicine and the life sciences can also be found under Lebenswissenschaften on the German-language information portal on research data management Forschungsdaten.info.