Unlocked Issue 2 | April 2024

April 30, 2024

Welcome to Unlocked

The Gates Foundation Open Access Newsletter 

Welcome to our second issue of Unlocked, the Gates Foundation Open Access Newsletter. Through this newsletter, we aim to provide updates and insights into the OA policy and projects at the foundation.

Announcing the 2025 Open Access Policy Refresh

With a decade of experience and lessons learned, the foundation is excited to announce that it is refreshing its Open Access policy to address ongoing challenges and advance systemic change in scholarly publishing. 

  • Requiring preprints and encouraging preprint review to make research publicly available when it’s ready. While researchers and authors can continue to publish in their journal of choice, preprints will help prioritize access to the research itself as opposed to access to a particular journal. 
  • Discontinuing publishing fees, such as APCs. By discontinuing to support these fees, we can work to address inequities in current publishing models and reinvest the funds elsewhere. 

The policy refresh will take effect on January 1st, 2025. The foundation will support the APCs of eligible articles submitted prior to January 1st, 2025.  

For more information, visit the Open Access Policy or read, the  Open Access Policy Refresh 2025 – One Pager (pdf). 

Spotlight: Who loses when scientific research is locked behind paywalls?   

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Ideas Blog

Who loses when scientific research is locked behind paywalls? 

Announcing our expanded policy for open access to scientific research, after a decade of experiences and learnings. Link

Thoughts & Talk

News and responses to the 2025 Open Access Policy Refresh

  • Will the Gates Foundation’s preprint-centric policy help open access? Link  
  • Advancing Equity and Innovation in Research Publishing: Time for a New Era in the Open Access Movement? Link  
  • Is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s new OA policy the start of a shift towards preprints? Link  

VeriXiv Supports Gates-Funded Researchers to Comply with New Open Access Policy

F1000 and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced plans to launch a new verified preprint platform that will enable the rapid availability of new findings and promote research integrity. VeriXiv [pronounced very-kive] will support researchers in complying with the Gates Foundation’s refreshed open access policy that requires all their funded research to be made available as a preprint from January 2025.

Preprints are the version of a research paper shared prior to peer review and publication in a journal. While preprints make the latest research available more quickly, their growing use in sharing findings ahead of peer review has added to concerns about the potential for dissemination of misinformation. However, unlike many preprint servers, VeriXiv will conduct a series of rigorous pre-publication checks to support greater research integrity.

Read the full announcement here.

Next Steps Unlocked!

Here are a few things to help you prepare for the Open Access Policy Refresh 2025.