CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: gates foundation open access policy

  • BioRxiv Preprint Server: NIH, Wellcome and Gates Compared

    Funder preprint requirements diverge sharply in 2026: the Gates Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) now mandate deposit on a recognised server such as the preprint server bioRxiv or its sister site medRxiv, the NIH indexes eligible preprints in PubMed Central without treating them as compliance, and Wellcome requires them only in defined public-health-emergency scenarios. Research administrators tracking multi-funder portfolios need a single reference for which rule applies where.

    A preprint server is an open-access repository — such as bioRxiv for biology or medRxiv for health sciences — where researchers post a complete but not-yet-peer-reviewed manuscript for immediate public access. Both platforms are operated by openRxiv, a nonprofit formed in 2025 specifically to run bioRxiv and medRxiv independently of their founding host institution.

    What Is a Preprint Server Like bioRxiv?

    A preprint server is a repository for manuscripts that have not yet completed formal peer review. bioRxiv, co-founded by John Inglis and Richard Sever, launched in November 2013 as a life-sciences equivalent to arXiv. Its companion site, medRxiv, covers health and clinical research and applies additional pre-posting screening because of the sensitivity of medical findings.

    Submissions to both platforms undergo basic scrutiny — plagiarism screening, an appropriateness check, and a safeguarding review — but not peer review itself. Roughly two-thirds of bioRxiv preprints are later published in a peer-reviewed journal, and by early 2026 bioRxiv was recording around four million article downloads a month, according to a Nature analysis of the server’s first 13 years.

    Which Funders Require Preprinting in 2026?

    Funder policy on preprints splits into three tiers: outright mandates, conditional requirements, and pure encouragement. The table below summarises the position of four major research funders as of 2026.

    Funder Preprint requirement Effective date Compliance role
    Gates Foundation Mandatory — deposit before or at journal submission, CC BY licence 1 January 2025 Core requirement of the Open Access Policy
    HHMI Mandatory for HHMI investigators, scholars and Janelia scientists 1 January 2026 Preprint required before journal submission
    Wellcome Trust Required only for research with significant public health implications; encouraged otherwise Ongoing Accepted as a fallback open access route if a fully OA journal or Europe PMC deposit is unavailable
    NIH Not required Preprint Pilot ongoing Discoverability only — does not satisfy the NIH Public Access Policy

    Two funders — Gates and HHMI — now treat preprinting as a compulsory step in the research lifecycle. NIH and Wellcome instead fold preprints into a wider menu of open access routes, which is the detail most other coverage of this topic omits.

    How Does the NIH Preprint Pilot Treat bioRxiv Deposits?

    The NIH Preprint Pilot makes eligible NIH-funded preprints — including bioRxiv and medRxiv deposits — discoverable in PubMed Central and PubMed, tagged clearly as preprints rather than peer-reviewed literature. This is a discoverability mechanism, not a compliance mechanism.

    Posting a preprint does not fulfil the NIH Public Access Policy. Grantees must still deposit the final, accepted peer-reviewed manuscript in PMC. NIH does, however, permit researchers to cite preprints in grant applications and progress reports, which gives early findings some formal standing without changing the underlying compliance obligation.

    Does Wellcome Require or Just Encourage Preprints?

    Wellcome strongly encourages preprinting across its funded portfolio and requires it specifically where a disease outbreak or comparable public health emergency makes rapid sharing a priority. Outside those defined scenarios, preprinting is not compulsory.

    Wellcome’s primary open access compliance routes are publication in a fully open access journal or deposit of the author’s accepted manuscript in Europe PMC. A CC BY-licensed preprint is accepted as a valid compliance route only if neither of those primary routes is available — a fallback position, not a default requirement.

    What Changed When bioRxiv and medRxiv Became openRxiv?

    bioRxiv and medRxiv were hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) from launch until 11 March 2025, when ownership transferred to openRxiv, a newly formed nonprofit dedicated solely to running the two preprint servers. This is a provenance detail funder-policy roundups routinely miss, and it matters for research administrators: openRxiv, not CSHL, is now the governing body whose terms of use and licensing options apply to deposits made under Gates, HHMI, Wellcome and NIH-linked research.

    The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has funded platform development on both sites since 2017, part of a broader pattern of philanthropic infrastructure investment that runs parallel to — and distinct from — the funder mandates covered above.

    Common Questions About bioRxiv and Preprint Servers

    Is bioRxiv a preprint server?

    Yes. bioRxiv is an open-access preprint server for the biological sciences, hosting complete but not-yet-peer-reviewed manuscripts. It does not conduct peer review itself, though submissions undergo basic screening and reviews from journals or platforms such as Review Commons may be posted alongside preprints.

    Is it free to publish on bioRxiv?

    Yes. Authors register without charge and there is no fee to deposit a manuscript on bioRxiv or medRxiv. This zero-cost deposit model is one reason funders increasingly treat preprinting as a low-friction first step toward full open access compliance.

    What is a preprint server?

    A preprint server is an online repository where researchers post manuscripts before or during formal peer review, giving the wider research community immediate access to findings. bioRxiv and medRxiv are the leading discipline-specific examples in the life and health sciences.

    What are the disadvantages of preprints?

    Preprints add an extra step to the publishing process, are not peer-reviewed at the point of posting, and can attract premature media coverage or public comment before findings are validated. Some journals and funders still weigh these risks against the benefit of faster dissemination.

    What This Means for Institutions and Researchers

    Research administrators managing grants across multiple funders now need to track preprint policy at the individual-funder level rather than assuming a single institutional rule applies. A grantee funded jointly by Gates and NIH, for example, must preprint to satisfy Gates while still separately depositing the accepted manuscript in PMC for NIH.

    • Confirm licence requirements before deposit — Gates and HHMI specify CC BY, which is not the default licence offered on every server.
    • Do not treat NIH Preprint Pilot indexing as equivalent to Public Access Policy compliance — the two are separate obligations.
    • Check Wellcome’s public-health-emergency criteria before assuming preprinting is optional on a given grant.
    • Record the openRxiv terms of use in grant files, since bioRxiv and medRxiv are no longer governed by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

    The Direction of Travel for Funder Preprint Policy

    The trend across 2025 and 2026 runs firmly toward mandatory preprinting among the largest philanthropic funders, while NIH and Wellcome hold a more conditional position rooted in their existing open access frameworks. Institutions should expect more funders to follow the Gates and HHMI model as preprint infrastructure matures under openRxiv’s independent stewardship. Research administration teams that build funder-specific preprint checklists now, rather than applying a single blanket policy, will be better placed as more mandates convert from encouragement to requirement.

    For related definitions and terminology used across research administration and open access compliance, see the CASRAI Dictionary and the research administration resource hub.

  • cOAlition S Funders: Who’s In, Who Has Left

    cOAlition S funders are the roughly two-dozen national research funders, charitable foundations and international bodies — including UKRI, Wellcome Trust, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Commission — that publicly endorsed Plan S in 2018 and continue to require immediate, CC BY open access from their grant recipients. Not every major funder stayed the course: the Gates Foundation has diverged toward a preprint-first model, and the European Research Council, Sweden’s Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and India’s national funders withdrew or declined to join outright.

    cOAlition S is the funder consortium — not a legal entity but a voluntary alliance of research-funding and research-performing organisations — that created and continues to steward Plan S, the 2018 open-access mandate requiring full and immediate public access to publications arising from the funding it provides. This guide sets out exactly who is in that coalition today, who has left, and what that split means for grants administrators trying to work out which awards trigger Plan S compliance obligations.

    What is cOAlition S and who funds it?

    cOAlition S launched on 4 September 2018 when a group of eleven national research funding organisations, coordinated through Science Europe, announced a “collective declaration of commitment” to mandate open access from 1 January 2020. The coalition has since grown to include national funders across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, several of the world’s largest biomedical and scientific charities, and formal support from the European Commission and the World Health Organization.

    Membership is not static. Funders join, adjust their policies, or step away as their own institutional priorities and legal constraints evolve — which is exactly why a periodically-updated reference list, rather than a single static claim, is the useful format for this question.

    Which funders currently back Plan S?

    cOAlition S’s own organisations page groups its supporters into national funders, charitable and international funders, and European funders (including the European Commission). Based on cOAlition S’s published membership record and the sourced Wikipedia membership history, the coalition’s core currently includes the following.

    • National research funders: UK Research and Innovation (UKRI); Austrian Science Fund (FWF); France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR); Science Foundation Ireland (SFI); Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN, Italy); Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR); Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO); Research Council of Norway (RCN); National Science Centre, Poland (NCN); Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal); Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS); Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas), Forte and Vinnova; Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF); Academy of Finland; National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC, Australia); South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC); Jordan’s Higher Council for Science and Technology; and Zambia’s National Science and Technology Council.
    • Charitable and international funders: Wellcome Trust; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (with a materially diverged policy — see below); the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); Templeton World Charity Foundation; and Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP).
    • Institutional and multilateral support: the European Commission, which funds Horizon Europe on Plan S-aligned open-access terms, and the World Health Organization.

    cOAlition S publishes this list as a live, JavaScript-rendered directory rather than a static page, so administrators verifying a specific funder’s status should cross-check coalition-s.org/organisations directly rather than relying solely on any single secondary source, including this one.

    Which funders have left or diverged from Plan S?

    Three organisations have formally withdrawn from or declined to join cOAlition S, and one major member has substantially diverged from the original Plan S model while remaining nominally affiliated.

    Funder Status What changed
    Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Member, policy diverged 2024 “preprint-centric” policy took effect January 2025; the foundation stopped paying article processing charges (APCs) and instead requires a preprint at or before formal publication, rather than mandating immediate open access to the accepted manuscript itself.
    European Research Council (ERC) Withdrew, July 2020 Supported the initiative from 2018 but its Scientific Council withdrew, citing concerns that Plan S’s implementation was too restrictive for early-career researchers and limited publication-venue choice.
    Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ), Sweden Left, 2019 An early signatory that withdrew citing concerns over the implementation timeline.
    India (national funders) Declined to join, October 2019 Principal Scientific Adviser Vijay Raghavan announced India would pursue its own national open-access policy rather than sign on to cOAlition S.

    The Gates Foundation case is the one administrators most often ask about, because Gates remains publicly associated with the open-access movement while its funding terms have moved furthest from the original Plan S template. Its 2024 policy refresh, reported by Nature in April 2024, replaced APC funding with a preprint-first requirement — a shift toward green, repository-based access rather than the gold, journal-published-and-APC-funded model Plan S initially popularised. Wellcome Trust, by contrast, has kept its CC BY, zero-embargo requirement fully aligned with Plan S principles and remains a full cOAlition S member.

    How does this affect grant compliance for administrators?

    For research administrators, the practical question is rarely “is my institution generally Plan S-aligned” — it is “does this specific grant trigger Plan S obligations.” That depends entirely on the funder listed on the award, not on the institution or the discipline.

    • A UKRI, Wellcome, SNSF, NWO or European Commission (Horizon Europe) grant carries a live Plan S-style requirement: immediate, CC BY, zero-embargo open access to the peer-reviewed manuscript, with rights retention where the funder has adopted that strategy.
    • A Gates Foundation grant awarded or renewed after January 2025 requires a preprint at or before publication, but no longer carries a guaranteed APC payment — so budgeting APCs into a Gates-funded proposal on the old assumption will leave a funding gap.
    • An ERC (Horizon Europe) grant sits in a genuinely mixed position: the ERC itself withdrew cOAlition S support in 2020, but ERC grants are still funded under Horizon Europe, which the European Commission administers on Plan S-aligned terms — so the operative obligation traces to the Commission’s rules, not the ERC’s own institutional stance.
    • A grant from a funder never affiliated with cOAlition S (most US federal agencies, most Indian national funders) should be checked against that funder’s own policy rather than assumed to follow Plan S at all.

    The single most reliable compliance step is to check the specific funder named on the award letter against cOAlition S’s current organisations list and that funder’s own most recent policy document, rather than relying on institutional memory of what a funder required in 2019 or 2020.

    Frequently asked questions

    Has the Gates Foundation left cOAlition S?

    No. The Gates Foundation remains formally affiliated with cOAlition S, but its 2024 policy refresh — effective January 2025 — dropped APC funding in favour of a preprint-first requirement, moving its practical terms away from the original Plan S model without a formal exit.

    Is Wellcome Trust still part of Plan S?

    Wellcome Trust is a founding cOAlition S member and remains fully aligned with Plan S: its open-access policy requires immediate deposit of the peer-reviewed manuscript under a CC BY licence with no embargo, matching the original 2018 mandate.

    Why did the European Research Council withdraw from cOAlition S?

    The European Research Council backed the initiative in 2018 but its Scientific Council withdrew support in July 2020, stating that Plan S’s implementation guidance was too restrictive, particularly for early-career researchers‘ choice of publication venue.

    Where can I find the full, current list of cOAlition S funders?

    cOAlition S publishes its authoritative, continuously updated member list at coalition-s.org/organisations, grouped into national funders, charitable and international funders, and European funders — administrators should treat that page, not older news coverage, as the source of record.

    Implications and outlook

    cOAlition S was never designed as a fixed, closed membership — it is a voluntary coalition that funders join and leave as their institutional strategies evolve. The Gates Foundation’s shift toward a preprint-centric model is the most consequential recent change because it signals that even committed founding-era supporters are questioning APC-funded gold open access as the default route, in favour of greener, lower-cost alternatives. For institutions with active research administration functions, the practical takeaway is to treat “is this funder in cOAlition S” as a per-grant lookup rather than a one-time institutional assumption, and to revisit that lookup whenever a funder announces a policy refresh.

  • Gates Foundation Open Access Policy: No More APCs for cOAlition S Funders

    The Gates Foundation open access policy was refreshed for 2025, taking effect on 1 January 2025: the foundation stopped paying article processing charges (APCs) for individual manuscripts, added a mandatory preprint-deposit requirement, and expanded the policy’s scope to cover every funded manuscript and its underlying data.

    The Gates Foundation open access policy is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s mandatory framework requiring that all peer-reviewed research and data arising from its funding be made freely available, openly licensed, and reusable without embargo. As a founding member of cOAlition S, the funder that co-created and popularised Plan S in 2018, the foundation’s 2025 refresh is being watched closely as a signal of where other research funders may be heading on APC costs.

    What Changed in the 2025 Policy Refresh?

    The 2025 policy is framed as a “refresh” of the 2021 policy, not a wholesale replacement — the core repository mandate survives intact. What changes is scope and support. It now applies to “all published research funded, in whole or in part, by the foundation” — termed Funded Manuscripts — and to “any data underlying the Funded Manuscripts,” a broader remit than the 2021 text.

    Three elements define the refresh:

    • Mandatory preprint deposit for every funded manuscript, in addition to the existing accepted-manuscript deposit requirement.
    • An earlier trigger for open data: data must now be accessible as soon as the preprint is available, not only once the accepted article is published.
    • Withdrawal of financial support for individual APC payments, shifting that cost onto grantees and co-authors.

    Why Did the Foundation Stop Paying APCs?

    The 2025 policy is unambiguous on this point: “The Foundation Will Not Pay Article Processing Charges (APC). Any publication fees are the responsibility of the grantees and their co-authors.” This is a change to support, not to what is mandated — grantees were never obliged to use the foundation’s APC funds under the 2021 policy, but many did, particularly for publishing in fully open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

    The foundation frames this as part of a wider push against the gold-OA/APC model, which critics argue rewards well-resourced authors while pricing out others. Rather than underwriting per-article fees, it says it will back non-APC routes to open publishing, including its own Gates Open Research platform and select publisher partnerships covering Gates-funded authors outside the standard APC mechanism.

    The practical effect falls unevenly. Per an analysis by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe in The Scholarly Kitchen (15 April 2024), Gates grantees publish roughly 4,000 papers a year — about 0.07% of articles published globally — so the aggregate revenue impact on any single open-access publisher is likely modest, even though the effect on individual grantees lacking alternative funding can be significant.

    What Does the New Preprint-First Mandate Require?

    Every Funded Manuscript must now be “published as a preprint in a preprint server recognized by the foundation” that applies sufficient scrutiny, carrying a CC BY 4.0 licence or equivalent. This sits alongside — not instead of — the existing requirement that the accepted manuscript be deposited “immediately upon publication in PubMed Central (PMC), or in another openly accessible repository, with proper metadata tagging identifying Gates funding.”

    Two details matter for compliance teams:

    • Grantees can self-exempt from the preprint requirement where they determine “a preprint is not appropriate due to ethical, safety or other legitimate concerns” — the foundation has not yet published criteria for what counts.
    • The foundation is not mandating a single preprint server. It has said it will point grantees to ASAPbio’s preprint server directory rather than maintain its own list, though it separately partnered with Taylor & Francis/F1000 to launch VeriXiv, a verified preprint platform grantees may optionally use.

    Copyright-retention language is essentially unchanged: grantees must retain enough copyright to deposit and licence the manuscript CC BY 4.0, and include a foundation-mandated acknowledgement and rights-retention statement.

    How Does Gates Compare With Other cOAlition S Funders?

    The Gates Foundation is not the only cOAlition S member re-examining its terms, but it is the first founding funder to formally withdraw central APC funding. Wellcome Trust and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the two other funders most closely associated with Plan S’s origins, still fund publication fees through institutional block-grant mechanisms rather than the pay-per-article support the Gates Foundation has now dropped.

    Funder Current policy effective date Pays APCs? Preprint requirement
    Gates Foundation 1 January 2025 (refresh) No — discontinued for individual manuscripts Mandatory, narrow ethical/safety exemption
    Wellcome Trust 1 January 2021 Yes — via institutional block grants Encouraged, not mandated
    UKRI 1 April 2022 (journal articles); 1 January 2024 (monographs) Yes — via block grant to research organisations Not mandated
    cOAlition S / Plan S baseline Founding principles from 2018 Funder-dependent; no central APC cap post-2024 Not centrally mandated; Rights Retention Strategy supported

    cOAlition S has been diplomatic about the change. Responding to the refresh, Executive Director Johan Rooryck said: “Five years on since Plan S was first published, it is entirely appropriate that funders are reviewing their OA policies to ensure they are effectively meeting their goals… Our collective dedication to making full and immediate OA a reality remains the driving force behind our collaboration.” Separately, Rooryck told Nature the refreshed policy is not “entirely in line” with cOAlition S guidance, while noting member funders retain “a lot of leeway” in how they implement shared principles. The Scholarly Kitchen nonetheless judges the policy relatively well aligned with Plan S’s repository route, since the accepted-manuscript deposit mandate — the mechanism that satisfies Plan S compliance — is retained, not replaced.

    Common Questions About the Gates Foundation Open Access Policy

    Does the Gates Foundation still pay APCs?

    No. Since the 2025 Open Access Policy took effect on 1 January 2025, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation no longer pays article processing charges for individual manuscripts. Publication fees are now the responsibility of grantees and co-authors, though the foundation continues to fund open infrastructure and select publisher arrangements.

    Does the Gates Foundation require preprints?

    Yes. Under the 2025 policy, every funded manuscript must be posted as a preprint on a foundation-recognised server carrying a CC BY 4.0 licence, in addition to the existing requirement to deposit the accepted manuscript in PubMed Central or another open repository. Grantees may seek an exemption only for documented ethical or safety concerns.

    Is the Gates Foundation still aligned with Plan S?

    Largely, yes. cOAlition S publicly welcomed the 2025 refresh, and analysts judge the policy broadly consistent with Plan S‘s repository route despite the APC-funding withdrawal. Executive Director Johan Rooryck said the update reflects funders “reviewing their OA policies,” while stopping short of declaring it fully in line with coalition guidance.

    What are the Gates Foundation’s data-sharing requirements?

    The 2025 policy requires underlying data to be openly accessible immediately once the funded manuscript becomes available — including at the preprint stage. This is earlier than the 2021 policy, which triggered the data-sharing mandate only once the accepted article was formally published in a journal.

    Implications and What to Watch Next

    For grantees without alternative funding, the squeeze is real: authors who relied on Gates APC support for DOAJ-listed open-access journals must now find a fee waiver, an institutional agreement, or a non-APC venue, while still meeting deposit and rights-retention requirements some publishers only accommodate via paid gold-OA routes. Research administrators managing multi-funder compliance will need to track this alongside UKRI and Wellcome Trust obligations, since the three funders no longer follow a uniform APC-support model despite shared Plan S origins.

    For publishers, immediate revenue exposure looks limited given the modest volume of Gates-funded output, but the policy adds pressure toward non-APC business models — waiver programmes, “pure publish” institutional agreements, and preprint-native platforms — that cOAlition S’s own “Beyond Article-Based Charges” working group, established with Jisc and PLOS, is separately examining.

    The signal for other funders is the more consequential story. Gates is the first cOAlition S founding member to formally withdraw central APC funding while retaining a Plan S-compatible repository mandate. Whether Wellcome Trust, UKRI, or other coalition funders follow with funding recalibrations — rather than eligibility or embargo changes — is the development worth monitoring as institutions plan multi-year compliance budgets.

    Research administrators managing multi-funder open access compliance can find related standards context in CASRAI’s research administration resources.