World Bank joins push for open access to published research

The World Bank has launched an Open Knowledge Repository that allows anyone to distribute, reuse and build on the organisation’s published research for free.

The repository is the first phase of the World Bank’s wider open-access policy, which comes into effect on 1 July and requires all of the organisation’s output to be licensed under the creative commons by attribution licence. This is the most liberal of all open-access licences and allows free use of any World Bank publication, even commercially, as long as the bank is given credit for the original creation.