"Can the Gates Foundation's Embrace of Preprints Boost Open Access?"
In a move that could significantly reshape the landscape of scientific publishing, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced a groundbreaking policy shift that will redefine how its grant recipients share their research. Starting in 2025, the foundation will require its funded researchers to make their work publicly available as preprints, bypassing the traditional journal publication process.
This bold decision, which also includes the discontinuation of support for article-processing charges (APCs), aims to revolutionize the way scientific knowledge is disseminated. Preprints, which are manuscripts shared before peer review and journal acceptance, have long been touted as a means to accelerate the exchange of ideas and foster greater transparency. By mandating their use, the Gates Foundation is placing a renewed emphasis on the immediate accessibility of research findings.
"Our decision is driven by our goals of immediate access to research, global reuse and equitable action," explains Ashley Farley, a program officer at the Gates Foundation. This shift marks a significant departure from the foundation's previous open access (OA) policies, which had aligned with the cOAlition S initiative, a group of European funders promoting OA publishing.
The implications of this policy change are multifaceted. On one hand, the increased availability of research as preprints could democratize access and empower a broader community of researchers and the public to engage with scientific discoveries. However, the lack of formal peer review and the potential for discrepancies between preprint versions and final published articles raise concerns about quality control and the credibility of the research.
"Whether this will help the open-access movement or not, it's hard to know," says Lisa Hinchliffe, a librarian and academic at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "On the one hand, more research will become freely available in preprint form, but the final published versions of articles might become harder to access."
The Gates Foundation's decision to cease funding for APCs, a model that has faced increasing criticism for its potential to perpetuate inequities, is particularly noteworthy. As Juan Pablo Alperin, a scholarly communications researcher at Simon Fraser University, explains, "Stopping support for APCs sends a signal to the larger community, including the community of funders, that this mechanism is not a way forward."
The foundation's plans to invest in alternative OA models, such as "diamond OA," where publishers do not charge fees to authors or readers, as well as preprint servers and other dissemination platforms, suggest a multifaceted approach to addressing the challenges of the current publishing landscape.
While the full implications of the Gates Foundation's policy shift remain to be seen, it undoubtedly marks a significant turning point in the ongoing quest for greater openness and equity in scientific communication. As the research community navigates this new landscape, it will be crucial to monitor the impact on the quality, accessibility, and impact of scientific research, as well as the broader ripple effects on the publishing ecosystem.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00996-8
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