The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the second-biggest supporter of biomedical research in the United States, has signed up as a member with the open-access publisher BioMed Central. The agreement, which formalizes what the institute had essentially been doing in practice, means that it will pay for its scientists to publish in journals under the BioMed Central umbrella.

The Hughes institute announced in June that by next year it would require all of the scientists it supports to publish articles in journals that posted the material in public repositories within six months. The institute earlier this year reached agreements with Elsevier and with Wiley-Blackwell to pay charges for its scientists to publish in those companies’ journals.

The institute is now negotiating with other publishers, said Avice Meehan, vice president for communications and public affairs. “The end goal is to ensure broad access to the discoveries made by our investigators,” she said. “And we want to do that while ensuring that our investigators are more or less free to publish where they choose.” —Richard Monastersky