Gates Foundation

A summary of the 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 on outputs published OA
Embargo limit None allowed
Deposit locations PMC 'or equivalent' deposit required
APC payment exclusions No payment for APCs
APC payment source N/A
Other notes

Preprints required

New policy 01/01/25

Further information

What is covered by the policy

"Effective January 1, 2025, this 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."

This policy does not apply to:

  • "Works of opinion, such as ‘white papers’, key learnings reports, policy positions, etc."

Further criteria

"Funded Manuscripts shall be shared promptly in the form of a preprint"

"Accepted articles shall be deposited immediately upon publication in PubMed Central (PMC), or in another openly accessible repository"

"All Funded Manuscripts, including any subsequent updates to key conclusions, shall be available immediately, without any embargo, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)"

Rights retention

"Grantees shall retain sufficient copyright in Funded Manuscripts to ensure such Funded Manuscripts are deposited into an open-access repository and published under the CC-BY 4.0 or equivalent license."

As appropriate, authors should include the following statement:

  • “This work was supported, in whole or in part, by the Gates Foundation [Grant number]. The conclusions and opinions expressed in this work are those of the author(s) alone and shall not be attributed to the Foundation. Under the grant conditions of the Foundation, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License has already been assigned to the Author Accepted Manuscript version that might arise from this submission. Please note works submitted as a preprint have not undergone a peer review process.”

Paying for Gates Foundation publication

"The Foundation Will Not Pay Article Processing Charges (APC). Any publication fees are the responsibility of the grantees and their co-authors."

(All quotations taken from the Gates Foundation policy page on 29/01/2025)