"LONDON: One of the world's largest organisations funding science is to throw its weight behind a growing campaign to break the stranglehold of academic journals and allow all research papers to be shared online.
"About 9000 researchers have signed up to boycott journals that restrict free sharing, a campaign dubbed the ''academic spring'' by supporters due to its potential for revolutionising the spread of knowledge.
"But the intervention of the Wellcome Trust, the largest non-governmental funder of scientific research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is likely to galvanise the movement by forcing academics it funds to publish in open online journals.
"The director of the trust, Sir Mark Walport, said his organisation was in the final stages of launching a scientific journal calledeLifethat would compete with top-tier publications such asNatureandScience, seen by scientists as the premier publishing locations."
