27 March 2024
The Gates Foundation has announced a refreshed policy for grantees which ends the Foundation’s payment of individual article publishing fees and requires grantees to share preprints of their articles.
The Foundation is building on a decade’s experience of its current open access policy to introduce these measures. Their research has encouraged them to channel funds into outlets other than Article Processing Charges (APCs) which cost them around S$6 mil. a year.
They point out that preprints flourished during the Covid-19 pandemic as researchers and governments quickly sought to develop vaccines and therapeutics, but that they dwindled as the crisis did.