The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s top biomedical research funders, will from next year require grant holders to make their research publicly available as preprints, articles that haven’t yet been accepted by a journal or gone through peer review. The foundation also said it would stop paying for article-processing charges (APCs) — fees imposed by some journal publishers to make scientific articles freely available online for all readers, a system known as open access (OA).
The Gates Foundation is the first major science funder to take such an approach with preprints, says Lisa Hinchliffe, a librarian and academic at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. The policies — which take effect on 1 January 2025 — elevate the role of preprints and are aimed at reducing the money the Gates Foundation spends on APCs, while ensuring that the research is free to read.
