The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced a partnership aimed at advancing scientific communication and open access publishing.

Through the partnership, AAAS will allow Gates Foundation-funded researchers to publish their research under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY), enabling any article submitted to an AAAS journal after January 1 to be immediately available to the public to read, download, and reuse.

Announced in 2014, the Gates Foundation's open access policy requires that Gates-funded research papers be deposited in a specified repository and tagged with the proper metadata; be published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License or the equivalent; and be made available immediately upon publication, along with any underlying data sets. The foundation also has invested in a new publishing service, Chronos, which connects grantees and staff with twenty-four thousand journals offering open access options.

"We believe that innovating solutions, from helping the poorest to addressing emerging epidemics, goes hand-in-hand with innovating how we share these findings," wrote Gates Foundation COO Leigh Morgan in a post on Medium. "Sharing knowledge more freely leads to more innovation and more impact."