Starting next year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest biomedical research funding organization, will require grantees to publish their research findings in the form of preprints. The foundation also announced that it will cease payments for article processing charges (APCs).
Gates Foundation Shifts Funding Strategy, Impacting Open Access Preprints
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Lisa Hinchliffe, a librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, states that the Gates Foundation is the first major scientific funding institution to adopt this approach towards preprints. These policies aim to elevate the role of preprints, reduce the foundation's expenditure on APCs, while ensuring research findings are freely accessible.
APCs, fees charged by some journal publishers, are meant to make scientific articles available online for free to all readers, a system known as Open Access (OA).
However, the consequences of this policy remain unclear. Hinchliffe points out that while more research will be freely available in the form of preprints, the final published versions of articles, known as record versions, may become more difficult to access. Under the revised rules, after sharing manuscripts as preprints, authors will be allowed to submit them to their chosen journals without the need to opt for OA.
Ashley Farley, an official at the Gates Foundation's Knowledge and Research Services program, indicates that the decision is driven by objectives of immediate access to research outcomes, global reuse, and equitable action. Grantees will be required to publish preprints with the condition of allowing their content to be reused. The Gates Foundation plans to announce the full policy in the coming weeks.
In 2015, the Gates Foundation announced a requirement for grantees to make their research articles freely accessible by depositing them in open repositories. It later joined the European funding consortium cOAlition S and endorsed the group's Plan S, which mandates funders to publish their research outputs through OA routes.
However, the Gates Foundation's latest policy diverges from this consortium. A key difference between Plan S and the Gates Foundation's new policy lies in their stance on APCs. According to Rooryck, "Ceasing support for APC payments is not the policy of the consortium. It is a decision made by Gates."
Lynn Kamerlin, a computational biophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, considers discontinuing support for APCs a "very wise move," given the unsustainable rise in such costs in recent years.
Juan Pablo Alperin, an academic publishing researcher at Simon Fraser University in Canada, points out that APCs, as a means of supporting open access, are fundamentally unjust. Halting support for APCs sends a signal to a broader audience, including funders, that this mechanism is not the way forward.
Hinchliffe remarks that it's difficult to predict the impact of the Gates policy on scientific publishing. Some grantees may find it harder to publish in OA journals and rely more on preprints to disseminate their research findings. However, others may continue to publish through OA routes, especially if they have other funding sources for APCs or if their institutions have agreements with publishers that lower the costs of OA publishing.
Hinchliffe notes that despite being a major funder, the Gates Foundation only supports a small fraction of global research, and it's still unclear whether other funders will follow suit.
Another potential consequence of this policy is that the quality of manuscripts provided as preprints for free and the final versions behind paywalls may differ. Hinchliffe suggests that in some cases, those with access to the final versions may be better able to avoid certain types of errors than those relying solely on preprints. Kamerlin points out that an increasing number of preprint publishers allow authors to update preprints multiple times as needed, which may alleviate this concern.
Farley mentions that growing evidence suggests errors in early preprints are quickly addressed as more researchers can read and assess them. She adds that the Gates Foundation will provide grantees with a recommended list of preprint servers to ensure the scientific validity of the research.
Alperin believes that sometimes, the goal of publishing in journals can be a negative force in the scientific field, encouraging a focus on publishing papers in specific journals, whereas the real aim should be to conduct high-quality research, ensure research findings are disseminated, and communicate to the right audience.
