New Bill and Melinda gates foundation policy refresh for 2025

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have sent out notices that they will be changing their open access policy for authors in receipt of their funding:

Effective January 1, 2025, [the OA policy] has been expanded to apply to all published research funded, in whole or in part, by the foundation (“Funded Manuscripts”). The Open Access policy also applies to any data underlying the Funded Manuscripts.

Read more about the policy

Important changes include:

• A mandate for preprint deposits.
• The foundation will no longer pay article processing charges to make work open access.

But much of the policy will remain as it currently is with regards rights retention notices, PMC deposits and works being made OA on publication.

What do you need to do?

Gates have yet to set out their detailed guidance for implementing the policy in practice.

The Open Access team will keep our pages up to date. Expect changes between now and 01/01/2025.

Please do contact the Open Access team if you have any concerns, or openaccess@gatesfoundation.org if you wish to talk to the Gates Foundation directly.

Further reading and discussion

Plan S (of which the Gates Foundation is a signatory) announcement: https://www.coalition-s.org/the-bill-melinda-gates-foundations-open-access-policy-refresh  

LSE discussion blogpost: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2024/04/09/is-the-bill-and-melinda-gates-foundations-new-oa-policy-the-start-of-a-shift-towards-preprints