Is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's new OA policy the start of a shift towards preprints? | Impact of Social Sciences

"The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (the second largest charitable foundation in the world) recently announced a new open access (OA) policy. They will require articles resulting from work they fund to be posted as preprints and no longer cover fees for their publication in academic journals. This shift in focus from the peer-reviewed journal article to preprints aligns with a proposal called Plan U and marks a significant policy change for a major funder. It comes at a time of much discussion about the future of academic publishing, as journal peer review is coming under increased scrutiny and some are questioning whether it’s necessary at all....

Where then does this leave peer review? Critical examination of new findings is clearly essential to ensure progress is made on firm foundations. The question is whether the review process operated by journals achieves this effectively. Given that most papers change little during peer review, almost all end up being published somewhere and the current approach to journal peer review is only a relatively recent development anyway, many in the scientific community are questioning whether a judgment made at a single point in time by 2-3 anonymous referees could be improved on. By decoupling dissemination of articles from their subsequent evaluation, Plan U would create opportunities for alternative forms of review that do not conflate quality, interest and impact in an immutable unidimensional quality proxy: journal title. Meanwhile, some percentage of papers that will only be read by a small number of experts already well equipped to judge them may not warrant formal review at all...."