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Since its introduction in January 2015, the Gates Foundation Open Access policy has worked towards enabling unrestricted access and reuse of research funded by the foundation. On January 1^st, 2025, the policy will be updated, working further towards the goals of the Foundation to make research as accessible as possible for all.

In this blog, we dive into more detail on the 2025 Open Access mandate, and how publishing with Gates Open Research and VeriXiv can help Gates Foundation-funded authors comply with the upcoming changes.

The 2025 Gates Foundation Open Access mandate

The 2025 Gates Foundation Open Access mandate continues to build on previous iterations, furthering the Gates Foundation’s efforts in making the research it funds accessible to all and adhering to the key principles of Open Research. There are several components to this mandate that apply to all research funded by the Gates Foundation. These include:

• Funded manuscripts are to be made available as early as possible: Funded manuscripts should be published as a preprint in a preprint server. To fully comply, the preprint server should be recognized by the foundation, apply a sufficient level of scrutiny to the submissions, and submitted with proper metadata, to an openly accessible repository.
• All funded manuscripts are to be published “Open Access”: To allow all users to copy, redistribute, transform, and build on the research in any medium or format, all manuscripts should be made “Open Access”, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This ensures that grantees will retain sufficient copyrights, while making the information available to all.
• Any underlying data should be made accessible as soon as possible: Any underlying data supporting manuscripts funded by the Gates Foundation should be made available swiftly and openly, subject to ethical, legal, or regulatory requirements. This includes writing a data availability statement on where any primary data, associated metadata, original software, and any additional materials relevant to the manuscript can be found, according to the FAIR principles.
• The Gates Foundation will not pay any Article Processing Charges (APCs): Any publication fees are now the responsibility of grantees and their co-authors.

Preprint servers and VeriXiv

With the upcoming changes for Gates Foundation-funded authors, all manuscripts must be made freely available as soon as possible. To achieve this, authors will need to upload their work to a suitable preprint server.

Preprints offer authors the opportunity to publish preliminary versions of their work, allowing researchers to share their discoveries early on in their research journey. As well as enabling open dissemination of research findings, the speed at which research can be made available through preprints is significantly faster than traditional publishing. This allows researchers to increase the impact of their work as others can begin to cite it before full publication.

However, as preprints become more widely recognized as a citable research output, it is important that the research is verified prior to publication to help identify forms of malpractice, from poor research practice to fraudulent activity. This, in turn, helps to prevent the spread of misinformation, which can cause lasting damage to public trust in science, and the uptake of policies based on scientific outcomes.

Launched earlier this year, VeriXiv is a verified Preprint Server which aims to provide a much more rigorous set of quality checks than many other preprint servers, providing greater peace of mind to readers on the quality of the content. These checks are unique to VeriXiv and focus on three key areas: authorship, publishing ethics and research integrity. Preprints that pass these checks are made available as high-quality full-text HTMLs with associated metadata and typeset PDF, making research easily accessible and discoverable. 

In addition to these checks, authors submitting their work to VeriXiv also benefit from further Open Research checks of their work through the sharing of their underlying data, methods and code, aligning with the open data guidelines set out in the 2025 Open Access mandate.

VeriXiv and Gates Open Research

As of August 2024, all articles submitted to Gates Open Research will be uploaded to VeriXiv first and will only be eligible for publication if they pass the  full set of prepublication checks. These ensure the articles comply with Gates Open Research’s policies and ethical guidelines, as well as demonstrating originality and readability.

Once the submission has been accepted, it is published as a preprint on VeriXiv. The peer review process then begins, and experts are invited by the F1000 editorial team to review the submission for publication on Gates Open Research. The peer review process is transparent, with all review reports, reviewer details and author responses published alongside the submission, which remains on VeriXiv regardless of the peer review outcome.

Upon passing the peer review process on VeriXiv, the article will be transferred to Gates Open Research, and clearly signposted that it has passed open research checks and peer review on VeriXiv. As the final version-of-record publication venue, articles published on Gates Open Research will be indexed in Scopus, PubMed and other bibliographic databases. All published articles on VeriXiv and Gates Open Research are also indexed in Google Scholar, irrespective of peer review status. This final version of record on Gates Open Research links to the previous versions on VeriXiv, showing the article’s development over time.

Easily comply with the 2025 Gates Foundation Open Access mandate by submitting your research as a preprint to VeriXiv and continue the process by publishing with Gates Open Research, with no author-facing APCs for Gates Foundation-funded researchers.