The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation open access policy requires all peer-reviewed research and underlying data sets, funded in whole or in part by the foundation, to be:
- made freely available, with unrestricted access and reuse
- openly licenced under a CC BY licence
The policy applies to all grants awarded from 1 January 2015 and to all funded manuscripts from 1 January 2025.
It does not apply to monographs or book chapters.
How do I comply?
Funded manuscripts should be published as preprints on a foundation-recognised preprint server as soon as possible. VeriXiv was developed to help researchers comply with the updated policy.
Accepted articles should be deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) immediately upon publication.
All Funded Manuscripts must be accompanied by an Underlying Data Availability Statement that describes where any primary data, associated metadata, original software, and any additional relevant materials or information necessary to understand, assess, and replicate the Funded Manuscripts findings in totality can be found.
Gates Open Research
Gates Open Research is an Open Research platform available to Gates Foundation grantees and employees. All publishing costs will be covered directly by the Gates Foundation. For more information visit the Gates Open Research homepage.
Publishing open access in a journal covered by a publisher agreement
Our Library OA agreement search tool lets you check whether a journal is covered by a publisher agreement. The link in the ‘OA fees’ column of the search results takes you to a dedicated page with eligibility criteria and instructions on how to proceed.
Publishing in a fully open access journal not covered by a publisher agreement (including Frontiers and Springer Nature/BMC)
The Foundation does not cover Article Processing Charges (APCs) for any journal. Authors and co-authors are responsible for publication fees charged by fee-based open access journals.