Article: Will the Gates Foundation’s preprint-centric policy help open access?

"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.

But the policy’s ramifications are unclear. “Whether this will help the open-access movement or not, it’s hard to know,” Hinchliffe says. On the one hand, more research will become freely available in preprint form, she notes. On the other, the final published versions of articles, known as the version of record, might become harder to access. Under the revised rules, after sharing their manuscript as a preprint, authors will be allowed to submit it to the journal of their choice and will no longer be required to select the OA option."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00996-8