Payment of Publishing Fees

NOTE: This has not yet been updated to reflect the 2025 Open Access Policy Refresh

As a member of cOAlition S the foundation has discontinued paying publishing fees to hybrid journals for articles submitted in 2021.  Only publication fees for Gold OA journals or journals committed to OA transformation will be paid by the foundation’s central open access fund.

Grantees should not pay fees out of their budget or seek reimbursement from the foundation. The foundation is unable to reimburse grantees for payments already made to a publisher or service provider. Instead, invoices should be directed to the foundation for payment from the central budget directly to the publisher or service provider. 

Eligibility 

The foundation only supports the open access fees for research funded, in part or in whole, by the foundation.

A valid Gates grant number is required to be eligible for open access fee support.

The foundation will pay these fees from a central budget. Starting in 2021, all publishing charges for hybrid OA journals will be discontinued for articles submitted after January 1, 2021. Exceptions will be provided to Transformative Journals who have openly committed to transition to full open access within a set period of time.

Some journals, such as the BMJ, publish all research articles open access but charge for access to other content such as editorial and commentaries. These journals are not considered hybrid and the foundation will cover the APC and publisher fees for research articles published.

For individual articles, the central open access budget will also cover additional publishing costs such as page charges in order to minimize administrative burden. For special issues and supplements, only the open access publishing fees are covered by the central open access budget. The foundation’s program team and grantee are responsible for managing any publisher agreements and covering any additional costs beyond the open access fees. To ensure stewardship of the foundation’s funds, the program team is best positioned to determine if these additional costs and contract terms are warranted to achieve overall funding goals and outcomes.

Payment Process

1. Check to be sure that foundation will pay for the open access fees by using the Journal Checker Tool.
2. Check what process the publisher uses for APC payments. We do not process individual invoices for these publishers:
   • Several publishers provide dashboards to the foundation for article approval:
     • Elsevier
     • Frontiers
     • Wiley
     • MDPI
   • Other Publishers Provide Institutional Billing:
     • PLoS
     • Gates Open Research
     • American Chemical Society through Copyright Clearance Center
     • SAGE
     • Taylor & Francis
3. Include your specific Gates grant number when requested and in the acknowledgement section of your article. This is how your article will be routed through the proper workflows for open access fee payment to be made on your behalf.
4. For publishers not listed above please obtain an invoice from the publisher so that the foundation can make payment on your behalf. We are unable to pay by any other payment method.

Invoices for publishing fees must be addressed to the Gates Foundation & emailed to [email protected].

For a phone number use +1 206-709-3278

VAT does not apply & the foundation is not tax-exempt for this purpose

Invoices must also include:

• Gates Grant Number in the Purchase Order Field
• Article DOI or Title
• Indication that the article license is CC-BY

APC Spend Data

The foundation is committed to transparency of our open access and publishing fee spend. Data is available in the UCLA Dataverse repository.