Major biomedical funders have now made immediate preprint deposition the default mode of dissemination. Effective January 1, 2026, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Immediate Access to Research Policy requires HHMI investigators, scholars, and Janelia scientists—when serving as first, last, or corresponding author—to post both an initial preprint (prior to or upon journal submission) and a revised preprint (following peer review) on designated servers such as bioRxiv or medRxiv under a CC BY 4.0 license. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s 2025 Open Access Policy, applicable to all grants awarded since 2015, similarly expects funded manuscripts to be posted as preprints “as soon as possible” on recognized servers with the same open license.
National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded laboratories are directly affected when collaborating with HHMI or Gates-supported investigators. Although the NIH itself continues to encourage rather than require preprints, mixed-funding teams must now align timelines for bench and clinical research around public release before journal peer review is complete. This eliminates embargoes and reuse restrictions, compelling labs to prepare manuscripts for deposition earlier in the research cycle while maintaining rigorous internal validation of complex datasets common in translational studies.
Compliance workflows are straightforward: researchers upload to bioRxiv or medRxiv with funder metadata, a data-availability statement, and acknowledgment of the applicable policy. Most high-impact biomedical journals already accept preprinted submissions without viewing them as prior publication. Early posting can facilitate community feedback and establish priority, though it may invite heightened post-publication scrutiny in competitive fields.
As these policies mature, NIH-funded teams that integrate rapid preprint deposition into standard practice will gain advantages in visibility, collaboration, and evaluation. The mandates herald a preprint-first ecosystem that promises to accelerate discovery and translation across laboratory and clinical science.
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