Policies & Agreements

Gates Foundation: Open Access Policy

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committed to information sharing and transparency and have adopted an Open Access policy that enables the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed published research funded, in whole or in part, by the foundation, including any underlying data sets.

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Launched

| Updated: 6 Nov 2022

Organization:

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

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Keywords:
Best Practices, Editorial, Policy, Preprints, Publishing

Project Goals

Since 2015, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led a bold Open Access policy that prioritizes the access, transparency, and equity of funded research. With a decade of experience and lessons learned, the foundation is refreshing its Open Access policies to address ongoing challenges and advance systemic change in scholarly publishing:

Requiring preprints and encouraging preprint review to make research publicly available when it’s ready. While researchers and authors can continue to publish in their journal of choice, preprints will help prioritize access to the research itself as opposed to access to a particular journal.
Discontinuing publishing fees, such as APCs. By discontinuing to support these fees, we can work to address inequities in current publishing models and reinvest the funds elsewhere.
We will work to support an Open Access system and infrastructure that ensures articles and data are readily available to a wider range of audiences.

The policy refresh will take effect on January 1st, 2025.