The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s top biomedical research funders, will from next year require grant holders to make their research publicly available as preprints, articles that haven’t yet been accepted by a journal or gone through peer review. The foundation also said it would stop paying for article-processing charges (APCs) — fees imposed by some journal publishers to make scientific articles freely available online for all readers, a system known as open access (OA). In 2015, the Gates Foundation announced that it would require its grant recipients to make their research articles freely available at the time of publication by placing them in open repositories. It later joined cOAlition S — a group of mainly European research funders and organizations supporting OA academic publishing — and endorsed the group’s Plan S, by which funders mandate that grant holders publish their work through an OA route. Ending support for APCs is a “very sensible plan” given the unsustainable increase in such charges in recent years, says Lynn Kamerlin, a computational biophysicist and professor at the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “The Gates Foundation plan is the open-access plan I would have liked to see when Plan S was announced.”