The Gates Foundation is one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is the second largest charitable foundation, and as of 31 December 2023 had an endowment of around $75.2 billion. That makes a shift in its publishing policy hugely important.

An article in Chemical & Engineering News explains that hitherto the Gates Foundation has paid the publication charges of work carried out using its grants, provided the final version is available freely. That's what is known as gold open access. A number of Walled Culture articles have explained why that approach has failed. In March of this year, the Gates Foundation announced a "refresh" of its open access policies to "address ongoing challenges and advance systemic change in scholarly publishing". From January 2025 the Foundation will be:

Requiring preprints and encouraging preprint review to make research publicly available when it's ready. While researchers and authors can continue to publish in their journal of choice, preprints will help prioritize access to the research itself as opposed to access to a particular journal.

Discontinuing publishing fees, such as APCs [Article Processing Charges]. By discontinuing to support these fees, we can work to address inequities in current publishing models and reinvest the funds elsewhere.

Along with many other open access supporters, Walled Culture has been advocating a move to preprints as the primary publication medium for research. But the approach is not without its problems, notably in terms of the risk that bad players can use them to disseminate flawed research or intentional misinformation. In an attempt to deal with that issue, a new "verified preprint platform", VeriXiv, has been launched by the Gates Foundation together with F1000, part of the Taylor & Francis group:

While preprints make the latest research available more quickly, their growing use in sharing findings ahead of peer review has added to concerns about the potential for disseminating misinformation. To support greater research integrity, VeriXiv will conduct rigorous pre-publication checks. Each VeriXiv submission will undergo twenty ethics and integrity checks to assess a range of issues, including plagiarism, image manipulation, author verification, and competing interests.

In addition, open research transparency checks will also check whether the data is available in an appropriate repository and whether methods have been included to support reproducibility. Each preprint will have clear labeling so that readers know the level of verification conducted on the article and which levels have been passed.

Preprints are a key element of diamond open access, where there are no charges for either the reader or the researcher. The momentum behind what was once a fringe approach seems to be growing. Last year, the open access group cOAlition S made an important move towards diamond open access based around preprints. In July of this year, the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance was announced at a UNESCO event. The switch by the Gates Foundation from supporting gold open access to requiring preprints is another important signal that diamond open access is the way forward for the widespread, free dissemination of academic knowledge - something that copyright has prevented for too long.