The world’s largest philanthropy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, recently took a radical step aimed at giving preprints—freely available draft manuscripts that have not been peer reviewed—a much more prominent role in science. Starting in 2025, the foundation will require grantees to post as preprints all manuscripts that result from research it funds. It will also stop paying for researchers to publish their papers in journals that charge a fee to make papers free.

In an online Q&A., the foundation says the move to preprints will allow researchers to share research results as soon as they’re ready, and not wait weeks or months for journals to complete their review processes. The policy could also encourage authors and journals to publish only their best manuscripts in journals, reducing the workload on peer reviewers, who are volunteers. The philanthropy says its policy also avoids pitfalls of the business model of article-processing charges (APCs) , which has been blamed for incentivizing journals to churn out papers of limited value and supporting predatory journals that publish papers with no peer review at all.

But Kent Anderson, a scholarly publishing consultant and longtime critic of the open-access movement, says promoting preprints would be a mistake. Without a robust peer-review system, a surge of preprints could lead to researchers and the public becoming “ even more confused and puzzled about what constitutes reliable scientific findings,” he wrote on the Geyser, his online newsletter. He also doubts preprint servers will ever routinely sponsor meaningful peer review. Screening and checking manuscripts “ are just costly headaches,” he wrote, “ and the expense level needed for these would far exceed the small grants preprint servers receive.”

“The jury’s still a little bit out on preprints, but it’s certainly a place of great innovation and dynamism,” says Alondra Nelson, a social scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study. But, “It’s clear that we need to reimagine peer review in some ways,” she adds, in part because the steady growth of published research papers is taxing the researchers who volunteer to conduct the reviews.

The Gates foundation policy aligns with calls by some open-access advocates to de-emphasize the role of journal articles in quality control and professional evaluations. Those advocates envision a future in which employers evaluate and promote researchers based on a selection of their best manuscripts, including reviewed preprints—a change that might ease the pressure on scientists to publish in highly ranked journals that are paywalled or charge APCs.

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