The NIHR is rallying behind an international initiative championing openness and transparency in research.

Researchers, institutions and organisations from across the world are gearing up to celebrate Open Access Week 2017, a global community-driven campaign running from 23-29 October to promote openness in research by encouraging unrestricted sharing of study results with everyone.

This year’s theme of ‘Open in Order to…’ urges individuals and organisations to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realised from making scholarly outputs openly available. This ranges from increasing the impact of studies, enabling more equitable participation in research and accelerating transition of research into economic gain.

We support this initiative and recognise that it is important that researchfunders and policy makers back it. Our open access policy ensures that ideas and knowledge derived from publicly funded research must be made available for public use.

More than 1,300 studies have been published in our peer-reviewed, open access NIHR Journals Library, with each report providing the full account of the research project from start to finish, including methods and a full description of the results.

We are an established leader in the national and international health research funder community in Adding Value in Research and recently won a prestigious Cochrane-REWARD first prize for our work in reducing waste in research.

We have also signed up to an international joint statement, developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) pledging to ensure clinical trials will be both registered and their results released to further reduce avoidable waste in research, improve transparency and strengthen the validity and value of the research base.

For more information visit the Open Access Week website.