Plan S is an initiative for open-access science publishing launched in 2018 [1] [2] by "cOAlition S", [3] a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries. The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2021. [4] The "S" stands for "shock". [5]
Per 2017 figures, the mandate of Plan S will cover about 6% of worldwide research articles, including about one third of articles in Nature and Science . Major publishers have been planning to accommodate this mandate by offering (or allowing) open access options to authors. [6]
The plan, launched in 2018, was structured around ten principles. [3] The key principle states that by 2021, research funded by public or private grants must be published in open-access journals or platforms, or made immediately available in open access repositories without an embargo. The ten principles are:
In October 2023, cOAlition S released a proposal that would "reimagine scientific publishing without any author fees" (diamond open access). [8] [9]
A task force of Science Europe, led by John-Arne Røttingen (RCN) and David Sweeney (UKRI), has developed a specific implementation guidance on the Plan S principles, released on 27 November 2018. [10] The development of the implementation guidance also drew on input from interested parties such as research institutions, researchers, universities, funders, charities, publishers, and civil society. [11]
During a transition period, it will remain permissible to publish in so-called transformative journals, defined as hybrid journals that are covered by an agreement to become a full open-access venue. [12] The contracts of such transformative agreements need to be made publicly available (including costs), and may not last beyond 2023. [10]
Publishing in any journal will continue to be permissible subject to the condition that a copy of the manuscript accepted by the journal, or the final published article, will be deposited in an approved open-access repository (green open access) with no embargo on access and with a CC BY licence. [12] As part of the Rights retention strategy, Coalition S plans to override journal policies that would forbid this. [13] [14] As of October 2021, this was done for over 500 works published in various venues. [15]
To re-use scholarly content, proper attribution needs to be given to the authors, and publications need to be granted a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to share and adapt the work for any purpose, including commercially. Scholarly articles must be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY 4.0, or alternatively CC BY-SA 4.0 Share-alike or CC0 Public Domain. [10] In particular, this allows them to be used in Wikipedia. [15]
Open access journals and platforms need to meet the following criteria to be compliant with Plan S:
Mirror journals, where one part is subscription based, with the other part being open access, are considered to be de facto hybrid journals. Mirror journals are not compliant with Plan S unless they are a part of a transformative agreement.
The implementation guidance was open for general feedback until 8 February 2019. [16] On 31 May 2019 the cOAlition S published an updated version of their implementation guidance in light of the feedback received during the consultation. [17]
Some commentators have suggested that the adoption of Plan S in one region would encourage its adoption in other regions. [18]
As of October 2018 [update] , organisations in the coalition behind Plan S included: [19]
International organizations that are members:
Plan S is also supported by:
Robert-Jan Smits stepped down in March 2019 [42] and later wrote a book about Plan S. [43] Johan Rooryck of Leiden University was appointed Open Access Champion by cOAlition S on 28 August 2019; [44]
In October 2018 the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) made it clear that US federal funders would not be signing up to Plan S. In an interview with the American Institute of Physics published 30 April 2019, OSTP Director Kelvin Droegemeier stated with regard to Plan S: "One of the things this government will not do is to tell researchers where they have to publish their papers. That is absolutely up to the scholar who's doing the publication. There's just no question about that." [45]
In 2018 Swedish Riksbank's Jubilee Fond (RJ) used to be a member, [46] but left the coalition in 2019 after concerns about the timelines of Plan S. [47]
On 25 October 2019, Vijay Raghavan announced that India would not be joining cOAlition S, [48] despite his supportive comments earlier in the same year. [27]
The European Research Council initially supported Coalition S in 2018, [49] but withdrew support in July 2020. [50]
The following institutional statements of support were issued:
Reactions included an Open Letter, signed by more than 1790 researchers, expressing their concerns about perceived unintended outcomes of the Plan if implemented as stated before the publication of the specific implementation guidance. [84] Another Open Letter in support of mandatory open access was issued after the publication of the specific implementation guide, and had been signed by over 1,900 researchers by the end of 2018. However, it did not reference Plan S specifically. [85] [86]
Stephen Curry, a structural biologist and open access advocate at Imperial College London, called the policy a "significant shift" and "a very powerful declaration". [87] Ralf Schimmer, head of the Scientific Information Provision at the Max Planck Digital Library, told The Scientist that "This will put increased pressure on publishers and on the consciousness of individual researchers that an ecosystem change is possible ... There has been enough nice language and waiting and hoping and saying please. Research communities just aren't willing to tolerate procrastination anymore." [88] Political activist George Monbiot – while acknowledging that the plan was "not perfect" – wrote in The Guardian that the publishers' responses to Plan S was "ballistic", and argued that Elsevier's response regarding Wikipedia "inadvertently remind[ed] us of what happened to the commercial encyclopedias". [89] He said that, until Plan S is implemented, "The ethical choice is to read the stolen material published by Sci-Hub." [89] Herpetologist Malcolm L. McCallum suggested that science requires a diversity of publishing types to serve the needs of the entire scientific community. [90]
Individual Plan S policies have also received a mixed reception from academics. For example, the Rights Retention Strategy has been enthusiastically promoted by Cambridge neuroscientist Stephen Eglen because it can be used by anyone to make their work open access. [91] In contrast, computational biochemist Lynn Kamerlin criticized the Rights Retention Strategy because, while it would create obligations for grantees it was unclear whether it would create legal obligations for publishers. [92] Similarly, Shaun Khoo has argued that the Rights Retention Strategy is a complex approach that creates an unrealistic burden for authors and may produce legal risk for authors, institutions and readers. [93]
The plan was initially met with opposition from a number of publishers of non-open access journals, as well as from learned societies. [94] Springer Nature "urge[d] research funding agencies to align rather than act in small groups in ways that are incompatible with each other, and for policymakers to also take this global view into account", adding that removing publishing options from researchers "fails to take this into account and potentially undermines the whole research publishing system". [87] The AAAS, publisher of the journal Science , argued that Plan S "will not support high-quality peer-review, research publication and dissemination", and that its implementation "would disrupt scholarly communications, be a disservice to researchers, and impinge academic freedom" and "would also be unsustainable for the Science family of journals". [87] [88] Tom Reller of Elsevier said, "if you think that information should be free of charge, go to Wikipedia". [95]
On 12 September 2018 UBS repeated their "sell" advice on Elsevier (RELX) stocks. [96] Elsevier's share price fell by 13% between 28 Aug and 19 September 2018. [97]
According to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), whose aim is to transform the business model of the largest publishers (by supporting projects like Project DEAL), Plan S puts smaller and emerging fully open access publishers at a competitive disadvantage, and potentially harms their prospects. Pure "gold" open access publishers may be put out of business by incentivizing authors to publish with large publishers which have the market power to negotiate their transition plans with funders, while no incentives are provided to authors to publish with smaller fully open access publishers and scholarly societies. [98]
On 28 November 2018 the journal Epidemiology and Infection published by Cambridge University Press announced that it would convert to the open access model of publication from 1 January 2019, citing changed funder policies and Plan S. [99]
On 8 April 2020, Springer Nature announced that many of its journals, including Nature , would become compatible with Plan S by publishing open access articles from 2021 and committing to an eventual transition to full open access. [100] [101]
On 15 January 2021, the AAAS, which publishes Science, announced a trial OA policy that accommodates Plan S's green open access rules. [102] This policy allows the distribution of an article's accepted version under a free license, without embargo and without charge. However, this is only permitted to authors who are under mandates by their Coalition S funders.
In February 2021, more than 50 publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley and Springer Nature, announced their opposition to the rights retention strategy of Coalition S. More specifically, Springer Nature announced their intention to override that strategy by making authors sign a license to that effect. [103] [104]
In 2024, the Gates Foundation announced a "preprint-centric" open access policy, and their intention to stop paying article-processing charges. This policy is not “entirely in line with cOAlition S”, because it does not mandate that an accepted manuscript be openly accessible. [105]
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright, which regulates post-publication uses of the work.
Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, Trends, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics, and assessment. Elsevier is part of the RELX Group, known until 2015 as Reed Elsevier, a publicly traded company. According to RELX reports, in 2022 Elsevier published more than 600,000 articles annually in over 2,800 journals; as of 2018 its archives contained over 17 million documents and 40,000 e-books, with over one billion annual downloads.
The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate's Web of Science.
The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the European Research Area (ERA). Starting in 2014, the funding programmes were named Horizon.
A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.
An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.
eLife is a not-for-profit, peer-reviewed, open access, science publisher for the biomedical and life sciences. It was established at the end of 2012 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society, and Wellcome Trust, following a workshop held in 2010 at the Janelia Farm Research Campus. Together, these organizations provided the initial funding to support the business and publishing operations. In 2016, the organizations committed US$26 million to continue publication of the journal.
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misleading information, deviates from the standard peer-review process, is highly non-transparent, and often utilizes aggressive solicitation practices.
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization that creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data, code, and governance. OurResearch is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Arcadia Fund.
Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy use/reliability and because of the enormous size of its collection; a 2018 study estimated that Sci-Hub provided access to most of the scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers. On 15 July 2022, Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprised 88,343,822 files. Since December 2020, the site has paused uploads due to legal troubles.
The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.
In India, the Open Access movement started in May 2004, when two workshops were organized by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. In 2006, the National Knowledge Commission in its recommendations proposed that "access to knowledge is the most fundamental way of increasing the opportunities and reach of individuals and groups". In 2011, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) began requiring that its grantees provide open access to funded research, the Open Access India forum formulated a draft policy on Open Access for India. The Shodhganga, a digital repository for theses, was also established in 2011 with the aim of promoting and preserving academic research. The University Grants Commission (UGC) made it mandatory for scholars to deposit their theses in Shodhganga, as per the Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of M. Phil./Ph.D. Degrees Regulations, 2016. Currently, the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 326 open access journals published in India, of which 233 have no fees.
Project DEAL is a consortium-like structure spearheaded by the German Rectors' Conference, on behalf of its fellow members in the Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany and tasked with negotiating nationwide transformative open access agreements with the three largest commercial publishers of scholarly journals for the benefit of all German academic institutions, including universities, research institutes, and their libraries. Through each of these agreements, the consortium aims to secure immediate open access publication of all new research articles by authors from German institutions, permanent full-text access to the publisher's complete journal portfolio, and fair pricing for these services according to a simple cost model based on the number of articles published.
The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.
Open access (OA) to academic publications has seen extensive growth in Australia since the first open access university repository was established in 2001 and OA is a fundamental part of the scholarly publishing and research landscape in Australia. There are open access policies at the two major research funders: The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Australian Research Council (ARC) and around half of Australian Universities have an OA policy or statement. Open Access Australasia, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) are advocates for Open Access and related issues in Australia.
Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.
Robert-Jan Smits has been the President of the Executive Board of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands since May 2019.
Subscribe to Open (S2O) is an economic model used by peer-reviewed scholarly journals to provide readers with open access (OA) to the journal’s content, without charging costs to authors. S2O converts journals that have a traditional subscription model to open access.
De S staat voor shock. (Robbert-Jan Smits, presentation at the Physics@Veldhoven conference, 22 January 2019).
'One of the things this government will not do is to tell researchers where they have to publish their papers. That is absolutely up to the scholar who's doing the publication. There's just no question about that.'
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