Plan S is an open access publishing initiative developed by 11 EU national funding bodies in September 2018. The plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders. Plan S requires that, from 2020, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant open access journals or platforms.
As Technica continues to study and prepare for Plan S, we take this time to discuss the core principles and potential positives and difficulties with the current path laid out in the plan. However, as we know, this is still a breathing document and could potentially change at a moment’s notice. Here are the 10 current core principles of Plan S:
- Article processing charges are covered by research funders and institutions, not authors
- Article processing charges must be standardized and capped
- Authors retain copyright of their work, preferably under a CC-BY license (which lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon existing work, even commercially, as long as they credit the authors for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered and is recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials). Further discussion on the different types of copyright licenses can be found here.
- Institutional repositories will likely be a valuable tool for meeting these targets
- Hybrid journals (subscription-based journals that allow authors to pay to make individual articles open access) are not compliant
- Funders must work together to make consistent criteria that publishers must meet
- In areas of unmet need, funder will incentivize and support new platforms and publishing avenues
- Funders will monitor compliance and sanction noncompliance
- Funders will work with universities to ensure that policies and strategies are aligned
- For books and monographs, the timeline may be extended beyond 2020
(As summarized in the ISMPP white paper, “A Multistakeholder discussion on open access and medical publishing.” Available at: https://www.ismpp.org/open-access-white-paper.)
Potential Positives:
1) The plan makes a bold statement and encourages an honest discussion about a pathway to open access for major journals and journal societies.
2) It could potentially create more standardization in journal submission and peer review processing as well as rights to reproduce, removing a burden from authors.
3) Greater access to research potentially leads to greater collaboration and discoveries as a whole.
4) The plan forces publishers to legitimately begin engaging with their potential barriers to and the overhead costs of open access.
Potential Difficulties:
1) The plan is potentially overly focused on journal open access, without seeing the bigger publishing picture.
2) It sets forth a difficult, perhaps impossible, timeline for publishers to achieve the aforementioned goals.
3) Subscription journals are often the largest source of income for a society (but not always its main goal to achieve). Compliance with open access could cause financial strain for many of these societies.
4) It does not lay out a plan for how these goals will or should be achieved, which could lead to unchecked sanctions by the Funders (per principle 8).
5) Transformative agreements with larger publishers may negatively affect smaller publishers.
6) Article-level open access could potentially be a good stepping stone but is not considered compliant as the plan does not recognize hybrid journals.
7) A focus on funders could lead to unintended conflicts of interest with regard to research topics and results.
8) The plan does not take into account the current requirements of humanities and social sciences (e.g., not all use an online submission form, require institutional affiliation information be captured, etc.) or their fundamental differences from STEM journals (i.e., for humanities, it’s essential that an authors’ ideas and expressions of that idea be protected however the author wants, which is not currently reflected in Plan).
