CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: gates foundation preprint policy

  • Credit Authorship Taxonomy: The Preprint Gap

    The credit authorship taxonomy (CRediT) is largely absent from arXiv and bioRxiv preprints because neither platform has an editorial office empowered to enforce it, neither offers a dedicated contribution-metadata field, and a preprint is not yet a fixed version of record. CRediT statements are collected later, when a manuscript reaches a journal that mandates them.

    CRediT is a controlled vocabulary of 14 defined contributor roles used to describe, role by role, what each named author actually did on a research output. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, and the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.

    Contents

    What Is the CRediT Authorship Taxonomy?

    CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) assigns one or more of 14 standard role labels — Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing — to each named contributor on a research output.

    • CASRAI originated the taxonomy in 2014 to complement, not replace, traditional authorship bylines.
    • NISO approved it as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, the current formal reference standard.
    • It is licensed CC-BY 4.0 and is distinct from the ICMJE authorship criteria, which govern who qualifies as an author at all rather than what each author contributed.

    The taxonomy is now embedded in the submission systems of major publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Sage and Nature Portfolio journals — almost always at the point of formal peer-reviewed submission or acceptance, not at the preprint stage.

    Why Don’t arXiv and bioRxiv Require CRediT Statements?

    Preprint servers skip CRediT largely because they have no editorial office analogous to a journal’s. arXiv and bioRxiv operate a lightweight moderation or screening check — confirming the submission is on-topic and not obviously unscientific — rather than the editorial and peer-review workflow that gives journals a natural checkpoint at which to demand a structured contributorship disclosure.

    A second reason is version-of-record ambiguity. A preprint can be revised multiple times before, or instead of, formal publication, and co-authorship or individual roles can change between versions — for example when a reviewer at the eventual journal requests new experiments performed by a newly added contributor. Locking a CRediT statement to an early preprint version risks misrepresenting the contributions behind the paper that ultimately gets cited.

    Neither arXiv nor bioRxiv has published an official policy explaining the omission; the absence reflects infrastructure and governance gaps rather than a stated objection to the taxonomy itself.

    The Submission and Metadata Gap Behind the Absence

    The practical blocker is metadata architecture. arXiv collects author information as a single free-text field with no dedicated structure for role-level contribution data. bioRxiv and medRxiv, run by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, capture somewhat richer structured metadata — including funder information — but likewise have no CRediT field in their submission forms.

    This differs from what happens downstream. Crossref’s deposit schema supports embedding CRediT contributor-role metadata against a published journal article’s DOI record, which is how a reader can eventually see machine-readable contribution data attached to the version of record. Preprint DOI records typically carry no equivalent CRediT element, because the preprint servers do not populate it and have no requirement to.

    Feature arXiv / bioRxiv (preprint) Typical CRediT-mandating journal
    Screening body Moderators (topic/scope check) Editorial board + peer reviewers
    Author metadata field Free-text author list Structured CRediT role fields in submission system
    Version status Multiple revisable versions Single accepted version of record
    CRediT statement required No Often yes, per publisher policy
    DOI metadata (CRediT roles) Generally absent Supported via Crossref deposit schema

    What Changes When a Preprint Reaches a CRediT-Mandating Journal?

    Once a manuscript that began life as an arXiv or bioRxiv preprint is accepted by a journal that mandates CRediT, the contribution statement is captured during that journal’s own submission or production workflow — not retrofitted onto the preprint record itself.

    Authors typically complete role selections in the publisher’s manuscript system (for example, at revision or acceptance stage), and the resulting statement appears on the published article page and, where supported, in the article’s Crossref-deposited metadata. bioRxiv and medRxiv link out to the published version once available, but the CRediT statement itself lives with the publisher’s version of record, not the earlier preprint.

    Answer-First Q&A

    What is the CRediT taxonomy?

    The CRediT taxonomy is a standardised, 14-role controlled vocabulary — covering roles such as Conceptualization, Investigation, and Writing – original draft — used to describe each named author’s specific contribution to a research output, distinct from authorship order or byline position.

    What are the 14 roles of the CRediT taxonomy?

    The 14 roles are Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, and Writing – review & editing, as defined under ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022.

    Do preprints need a CRediT statement?

    No. Neither arXiv nor bioRxiv currently requires a CRediT statement, since neither maintains the editorial enforcement mechanism or the structured metadata field that journals use to collect this information at submission or acceptance.

    What happens to author contributions when a preprint is later published?

    The CRediT statement is generated at the journal stage, through the publisher’s own submission system, and appears on the published version of record — it is not added retroactively to the original preprint page on arXiv or bioRxiv.

    Implications for Research Administrators and Institutions

    Institutions relying on contributorship data for research assessment, promotion cases, or authorship-dispute resolution should treat preprints as an incomplete contributorship record. The Contributor Roles Taxonomy resource maintained at CASRAI’s CRediT contributor roles hub and CASRAI’s broader authorship guidance both point research offices toward the published, CRediT-tagged version rather than the preprint when contributorship needs to be verified or cited formally.

    • Do not assume a preprint’s author order reflects final contribution roles — roles can shift before formal publication.
    • Check the journal’s published version, and its Crossref metadata where available, for the authoritative CRediT statement.
    • Use CASRAI’s research administration dictionary to confirm terminology when drafting institutional authorship policy.

    Outlook: Will Preprint Servers Adopt CRediT?

    Momentum toward richer preprint metadata is real but has so far concentrated on discoverability and version-linking rather than contributorship. Until arXiv or bioRxiv add a structured contribution field, and until a body with editorial standing is prepared to enforce it, CRediT statements will remain a journal-stage artefact rather than a preprint-stage one. Research offices and funders that want contributor-level accountability earlier in the research lifecycle will need to look to journal policy, not preprint infrastructure, for now.

  • bioRxiv License Update: What Changed for Authors and Reuse

    bioRxiv’s licence update, live via the platform’s Author Area since January 2026, lets authors request a change to a less-restrictive Creative Commons licence on a preprint already posted — without submitting a new version. The change can only move in one direction, towards more permissive reuse, and it exists chiefly to help authors bring older preprints into line with funder mandates that require CC BY.

    bioRxiv is a free preprint server for the life sciences, operated by the non-profit organisation openRxiv, which also runs the companion server medRxiv for health-sciences preprints.

    Contents

    What is the bioRxiv licence update, and why was it introduced?

    The bioRxiv licence update is a self-service feature that lets a preprint’s corresponding or submitting author switch its Creative Commons licence to a less restrictive option after posting, without triggering a full revision. openRxiv documented the mechanics in a step-by-step guide published on 7 January 2026, and followed up with a policy explainer on 20 May 2026 setting out the rationale.

    The trigger is compliance drift. Openrxiv’s own explainer states that a growing number of funders “require their grantees to apply specific licenses to their preprints, typically CC BY,” but that “many authors are unaware of this” and post under a more restrictive option by default. Before this update, the only remedy was submitting an entirely new version of the preprint and re-selecting a licence — a heavier process that also generates a fresh revision record. This is distinct from an earlier, smaller change in January 2025, when bioRxiv and medRxiv reordered their licence-selection menus to place CC BY at the top of the list; the 2026 update is the first mechanism that lets authors retroactively fix the licence on preprints they have already posted.

    How do authors request a licence change?

    The workflow runs entirely through the bioRxiv submission system’s Author Area and does not require re-uploading a manuscript. It applies only to the most recent version of a preprint, and only to preprints posted within the past two years.

    • Log into the Author Area from the bioRxiv submit page.
    • Locate the “Request License Update” box on the right-hand side of the page.
    • Select “Update license choice on previously posted papers.”
    • Choose the eligible preprint by its manuscript ID (only papers where the requester was corresponding or submitting author are listed).
    • Select a new, less restrictive licence and submit the request; a confirmation email follows.

    Two constraints apply strictly. First, the feature is unavailable if an incomplete revision is already in the submission system, or if a previous licence request is still pending. Second, a request can even be made after the preprint has been formally published in a journal, since the licence sits on the preprint record independently of the journal’s own copyright terms.

    Licence options compared: what actually changed

    bioRxiv preprints have long offered a choice of Creative Commons licences plus a “no licence” (all rights reserved) default, and a CC0 public-domain option for US federal employees such as NIH intramural researchers. What changed in 2026 is not the menu of options — it is that authors can now move an already-posted preprint from a more restrictive option to a less restrictive one after the fact.

    Licence Commercial reuse Attribution required Text-and-data mining / AI training Typical funder fit
    CC BY Permitted Yes Unrestricted, including commercial use HHMI, Gates Foundation, most cOAlition S funders
    CC BY-ND Permitted (no derivatives) Yes Mining permitted; no adapted/derivative outputs distributed Rarely funder-compliant
    CC BY-NC Not permitted Yes Restricted to non-commercial use Non-compliant with CC BY mandates
    CC BY-NC-ND Not permitted Yes Most restrictive; non-commercial, no derivatives Rarely funder-compliant
    CC0 Permitted (public domain) No Unrestricted US federal/NIH intramural authors only
    No licence selected Not permitted without separate permission N/A Reuse requires author permission Non-compliant with most funder mandates

    Because Creative Commons licences are irrevocable once attached to a public copy of a work, the update only runs in the permissive direction. An author can move from CC BY-NC to CC BY; the system rejects a request to move from CC BY to a more restrictive licence, since existing downloaded and archived copies would remain under the original, broader terms regardless.

    What this means for CC-BY reuse, text-and-data mining, and AI training

    bioRxiv’s baseline terms of use already permit text-and-data mining of posted content, which is the legal hook that has made preprint corpora attractive training data for machine-learning systems. The licence attached to an individual preprint then determines the scope of onward reuse beyond that baseline — and this is where the 2026 update has practical bite.

    Under CC BY, any party — including a commercial AI developer — may reproduce, adapt, and redistribute the work, provided the original authors are credited. Under CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-ND, commercial reuse (which covers most AI model training conducted by for-profit developers) is not licensed, regardless of the platform-level text-mining consent. That gap is precisely what several funders have moved to close: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s preprint requirement, effective 1 January 2026, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s preprint mandate, in force since 1 January 2025, both require grantee preprints to carry CC BY. The licence-update feature exists to let authors already out of step with those mandates fix a specific preprint without a full resubmission.

    For institutions and research-integrity offices, the practical implication is that a preprint’s licence — not merely its posting on an open server — is the operative variable for downstream reuse and AI-training permissions. Auditing grantee preprints for licence compliance, not just for the fact of preprint deposit, is now a distinct compliance step.

    Answer-first Q&A

    How do I update a bioRxiv?

    Authors can request a licence update from the Author Area of the bioRxiv submission system, using the “Request License Update” box, without submitting a full revision. The change applies only to preprints posted in the past two years and only to the most recent version, moving to a less restrictive licence.

    What are the licence options for bioRxiv?

    bioRxiv authors can choose CC BY, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-ND, or leave the preprint with no licence (all rights reserved). A CC0 public-domain option is also available specifically for US federal employees, such as NIH intramural researchers.

    Does bioRxiv count as published?

    No. A bioRxiv preprint is not peer reviewed and does not constitute formal journal publication; it is a publicly posted manuscript with its own DOI. Authors remain free to submit the same work to a journal afterward, and the preprint record persists independently of that later publication.

    Who maintains bioRxiv?

    bioRxiv is operated by openRxiv, a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing science communication, which also runs the companion health-sciences server medRxiv. openRxiv is supported by institutions including Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Sergey Brin Family Foundation.

    Implications for institutions, funders, and authors

    Research-administration offices tracking open-access compliance should treat the licence update as a remediation tool, not a substitute for correct licence selection at submission. It closes a specific gap — preprints posted before an author understood their funder’s CC BY requirement — but it does not apply to preprints older than two years, to superseded versions, or where a revision is already mid-process.

    For anyone advising authors on authorship rights and responsibilities, the clearest guidance is to check funder licensing terms before first posting, since fixing a mismatched licence later depends on the preprint still being within the two-year eligibility window. Related open-research terminology, including licensing and reuse definitions, is tracked in the CASRAI open-research dictionary.

    Expect other preprint servers to face similar pressure as CC BY mandates spread across research funders. The direction of travel — author-initiated, platform-mediated licence correction rather than manuscript resubmission — is a practical template other repositories are likely to adopt as funder compliance checks tighten.

  • 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.