How to Comply
All preprints must be freely available and openly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) or equivalent terms to allow others to build on and reuse the research. Here’s how to ensure your work complies with our policy and tips on navigating the process.
Find the right support
Choose the option that best matches where you are in your compliance journey. You can return to the step-by-step requirements below at any time.
Open Access Policy
Start here if you need a plain-language overview of the Open Access Policy (OAP), who it applies to, and what grantees are expected to do.
Compliance Options
Use this guide to understand your compliance options based on where your manuscript is in the publication process.
Help Center
Visit the Help Center for answers to common questions about preprints, licensing, data availability statements, and related requirements.
Contact Support
Email us if your question is grant-specific, your situation not covered in the guides, or you need help identifying the right next step.
Step by Step Guide
Acknowledge the foundation
Acknowledge the foundation and include your grant number in your Gates-funded manuscript. Your grant number should begin with INV followed by a series of numbers.
Gates foundation Open Access recommends the following acknowledgement:
“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.”
Post a preprint
Publish your work as a preprint in a recognized preprint server, such as VeriXiv or bioRxiv
If a preprint has not been posted before article acceptance, grantees should deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in a repository, like PubMed Central or Zenodo, with an open license.
Select a CCBY License
Ensure your work is available immediately and licensed CC BY (or equivalent)
Upon acceptance select the CC BY license which allows users to build upon research without restriction while also ensuring that appropriate attribution is given. Learn more about CC BY licenses.
Include a data availability statement
Include a Data Availability Statement that describes where the underlying data can be found.
This is required even where there is no data associated with the article. The Data Availability statement should not refer readers or reviewers to contact an author to obtain the data but should instead include the applicable details where the underlying data can be found. For more information review the Data Sharing Requirements.