Gates Foundation contracted OA.Works for programmatic compliance review (Jan 2025)

In January 2025, the Gates Foundation contracted OA.Works to perform programmatic compliance review at funder scale (S-0068). This is the reference implementation of the verification-shift documented in C-0025 / E-0044 at a major private funder.

OA.Works performs ongoing independent verification of grantee outputs — checking deposit, accessibility, license terms, and machine-readable metadata against grant requirements. The model is automated, continuous, and applies across the foundation's portfolio rather than as a sample audit.

The case is critical because it demonstrates the technical feasibility of programmatic compliance verification at funder scale. Once the operational template is in place at one major funder, the marginal cost of other funders adopting it is lower than building it from scratch — which is the trajectory C-0025 anticipates.

For institutions, the implication is that the Gates Foundation portfolio is a leading indicator. Compliance failures programmatically detected by OA.Works against Gates grants will prefigure compliance failures detected by similar systems against NIH, NSF, and Wellcome Trust grants in subsequent cycles.

R4 (require verifiable evidence rather than self-reported plans) is the operational expression of this evidence at the funder side.