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Ashley Farley

Program Officer / Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

ORCID ID 0000-0001-9310-6944

Over the past decade, Ashley Farley has worked in both academic and public libraries, focusing on digital inclusion and facilitating access to scholarly content. She completed her Masters in Library and Information Sciences through the University of Washington’s Information School. Ashley is Program Officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In this capacity, she leads the Foundation’s Open Access Policy’s implementation and associated initiatives. This includes leading the work of Gates Open Research, a transparent and revolutionary publishing platform. Other core activities involve supporting the strategic and operational aspects of the foundation’s library. This work has sparked a passion for open access, believing that freely accessible knowledge has the power to improve and save lives.

Ashley, what’s the biggest challenge you have encountered during your Open Access journey?

One of the biggest challenges during my Open Access journey has been the steep learning curve of the topic and staying current on all the open access developments. It can be a complicated and nuanced subject that can require significant time for reading, learning, and reflecting. But this is also one of the aspects that I love most about it!

If you had the power to pass an international law concerning Open Access, what would that be?

Through Open Access work, I have learned so much about copyright, Creative Common’s licenses, and author’s rights. If I had the power to pass an international law, I would require that authors retain the rights to their work. To enhance this, I would encourage the use of the most liberal of CC licenses to ensure that the research community itself has the inherent right to interact with that knowledge.