PLOS has been awarded a $3.3million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, underscoring its commitment to pioneer a shift away from traditional publishing models. The 3-year funding package from the Gates Foundation will support PLOS’ transition towards APC-free publishing by enabling authors, funded by the foundation, to publish with PLOS without facing APC barriers, and to contribute to open access publishing options for authors who do not have access to funding. This 3-year grant offers support while PLOS is actively working on new publishing models grounded in open science starting with an ongoing research & design project.
The grant will also support improvements to enhance the capture and dissemination of funding metadata and to experiment with the posting of peer reviews alongside preprints during the evaluation process, promoting greater transparency in scholarly communication.
The transition away from APCs is not a new concept for PLOS, which has been actively developing alternative business models since 2020 with the express aim of reducing financial barriers in scholarly publishing and fostering open access for a broader range of researchers. PLOS has been a vocal champion regarding the benefits of preprints for the early sharing of research and has significant partnerships with bioRxiv, medRxiv and earthRxiv.
“Our goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of APC-free, open science-based publishing models and inspire a transformative shift across the scholarly communication landscape,” said Niamh O’ Connor, Chief Publishing Officer at PLOS. “We are grateful for the foundation’s funding support as we explore ways to transition publishing services away from ‘per published unit’ based pricing and incentivize sharing the form of output most appropriate to the research.”
