Gates Foundation partnership
Accelerating open science with support from the Gates Foundation
Aligned with our work to catalyze change in scholarly publishing, PLOS has been awarded a $3.3 million grant from the Gates Foundation to support further development of our alternative business models and efforts to move research communication beyond the article.
The three-year funding provides support for Gates grantees who choose to publish in PLOS journals, will enable improvements in capturing and disseminating funder metadata, and allows us to pilot a program to advance the sharing of preprints and open peer review.
Our aims
Support for alternative open access business models
We are a pioneer of open access models grounded in equity and transparency that don’t rely on APCs. Developing sustainable solutions that support a range of research artifacts in addition to articles is an ongoing focus of our Redefining Publishing project.
The Gates Foundation grant supports open access publishing during this time by contributing to publication service costs for researchers without access to funding for open access publication in PLOS Global Public Health. As part of the grant, Gates-funded authors will continue to be able to publish in any PLOS journal without facing APCs.
Increase transparency in funder metadata
We’re working to improve the mechanisms for the capture and dissemination of funder metadata in published articles in order to allow better identification and tracking. These enhancements will allow funding agencies to better monitor the outputs and impacts of research. Outputs from this work will be shared publicly in order to enable others to adopt similar approaches.
Increase engagement with preprints and open peer review
Preprints are a valuable tool for researchers to take control of when to share their findings, reach the broadest possible community, and seek collaborative feedback. We encourage authors to share preprints and facilitate preprint posting to make sharing easy for authors who submit to our journals.
For a trial period, we will now enable authors submitting to PLOS Global Public Health to opt-in to have their peer review comments posted alongside their preprints. This experiment will help us to study what motivates authors to share their work early and how preprint reviews can improve transparency and accountability in the research-sharing process.
Paving the way for open science publishing
Our work on capturing funder metadata and insights from our preprint trial with PLOS Global Public Health will be shared publicly to provide a model for the broader scholarly community. Our aim is to stimulate positive change in the publishing sector beyond this partnership by demonstrating what is possible.
Learn more about open peer review and preprints
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