Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

A summary of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's open access policy and their requirements for researchers who receive funding from them.

Requirements overview

Requirement Detail
Acknowledge the funder Required
Data accessibility statement Required
Rights retention statement Required
Specific licence CC BY 'or an equivalent license' required
Embargo limit None allowed
Deposit locations PMC deposit required
APC payment exclusions No payment for hybrid titles
APC payment source 'The Foundation will pay all necessary fees'
Other notes

Preprints encouraged

New policy due 01/01/25


Further information - pre-01/01/25

What is covered by the policy

"All Funded Research consisting of manuscript submissions and data depositions made starting January 1, 2021.

This policy implementation change will not apply to:

  • Review articles and other works of synthesis or opinion/analysis where grantees are invited to contribute on a specific topic.
  • Researchers publishing monographs or book chapters."

Further criteria

"Accepted articles shall be deposited immediately upon publication in PubMed Central (PMC), or in another openly accessible repository, with proper metadata tagging identifying Gates funding. In addition to PMC, grantees are encouraged to deposit their accepted article in a subject specific or institutional repository of their choice."

 

"Grantees must include the following acknowledgment in manuscripts submitted for publication:

'This work was supported, in whole or in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [grant number]. Under the grant conditions of the Foundation, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License has already been assigned to the Author Accepted Manuscript version that might arise from this submission.'”

Paying for Gates Foundation publication

"The foundation shall pay reasonable fees required by a publisher or repository to effect immediate, open access to the accepted article. This includes article processing charges and other publisher fees. For special issues and supplements, only the article processing charges are covered by the foundation. Effective as of January 1, 2021, the Foundation shall only pay these fees for articles publishing in fully Open Access journals."

(All quotations taken from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation policy page on 07/06/2023)