A family of scientific journals announces a change in the open access policy

In a step towards open access, the editor of Science will begin to allow some authors who publish in its high-level subscription journals to share their openly accepted manuscripts online on liberal terms which mean anyone can reproduce or redistribute the work.

The change ensures that scientists with grants from certain funding agencies that insist on open access (OA) publishing as part of the bold Plan S initiative can still publish in the Science family of subscription journals. About two dozen funders signed up for Plan S, which officially began on January 1, 2021, though individual agencies have different start dates.

Over the past two months, many selectively-subscription journals have offered authors a fee to publish their articles in open access, in response to Plan S. But the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC, which publishes Science, says he wants to avoid this because he is concerned about the introduction of open access publication fees that could be financially out of reach for authors.

The new AAAS policy allows researchers funded by certain Plan S agencies to freely publish accepted versions of their papers online as soon as their papers appear – and under open licenses that allow anyone to redistribute or reproduce the manuscripts. . (Some Plan S agencies have yet to finalize their policies on sharing manuscripts, such as the UK national funder, UK Research and Innovation, so the policy does not apply to them yet.)

The AAAS already allowed this type of immediate author-initiated sharing, sometimes referred to as green open access, but its terms stipulated that manuscripts could only be shared on personal or institutional webpages and could not be redistributed. Researchers also had to wait six months before they could publish manuscripts in repositories such as PubMed Central. This has not satisfied Plan S funders, who claim that if scientists cannot publish OA in journals (a process sometimes referred to as Gold OA), then they must share their accepted manuscripts under fully open licenses as soon as possible. their publication.

Legal obligation

In July 2020, some Plan S funders even said they would make it a legal condition of grants that authors retain the right to openly share their accepted manuscripts – no matter what the publication agreement says. review.

The AAAS now says scientists funded by Plan S agencies who adopt this “retention of rights system” (RRS) will be able to apply open licenses to their shared manuscripts. No other scientist who publishes in AAAS journals will be able to do this.

Plan S has always enabled authors to comply with its policy through this type of green OA, explains Johan Rooryck, the executive director of cOAlition S, the group of funders that joined the initiative. “We are delighted that the AAAS is updating its policy to explicitly allow the sharing of these manuscripts,” he said in a statement.

The new arrangement, which applies to all research submitted to the family journals Science since the start of this year, could see many Science manuscripts shared with open licenses. According to a report by Clarivate Analytics in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 31% of articles published in Science in 2017, recognized grants from a Plan S donor.

Some other journals have also adopted the green OA to comply with Plan S. New England Journal of Medicine told donors in October that he would authorize green OA in 2021 for scientists funded by Plan-S, for example. The Royal Society of London has allowed green OA in its journals for years and allows this to be done under an open license if funders require it.

Routes to open access

Other highly selective subscription journals have adapted to Plan S in different ways. In November, publisher Springer Nature said it would offer OA in Nature-branded journals at a cost of € 9,500 (US $ 11,500) per article; it is also testing a program to reduce the prices of some of its journals. (Nature is editorial independent of its publisher.)

And in December, publisher Elsevier in Amsterdam announced a series of OA options for Cell Press journals, with a charge of € 8,500 to publish OA in Cell and € 7,600 for other journals.

But many scientists worry that these prices are too high. While Plan S funders can pay their scientists’ fees, many other researchers will not be able to afford the OA option. (Elsevier said he would waive open access fees for researchers in low-income countries and reduce them for some others.) This is why AAAS opted for green OA, rather than introducing the ‘OA gold in its subscription journals, the publisher explained.

“This approach reflects AAAS ‘concern that facilitating open access by routes to gold alone places an undue financial obligation on authors, which could freeze in place or further exacerbate long-standing inequalities for authors. across race, gender, geography, disciplines and institutions, ”he said statement.

Publication rights

“It’s a bold decision to go for a green OA solution to meet Plan S requirements, and it should be noted that they highlight the inequalities associated with the item processing load business model,” says Stephen Curry, structural biologist at Imperial College London.

The AAAS approach means that most scientists who publish in its journals will not have a fully OA option, notes Lisa Hinchliffe, librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign. “It is unfortunate that this perpetuates the gaps we see in the ecosystem, where the privileges of certain publication channels are extended to some researchers but not others – in this case, reflecting the uneven adoption of Plan policies. S, even within the family of Plan S donors, “she says.

How to fund the wholesale shift from a pay-to-read model to an OA model remains extremely controversial. Some journals, hoping to move slowly from subscription to OA business models, have entered into agreements in which libraries or institutions pay a lump sum to cover the cost to their authors of both reading the content. subscription and publication of the OA. In December, 11 editors opposed the adoption of green OA, saying it would “undermine progress” towards full OA and that the registration version of an article, not the accepted manuscript, should be what is made public.

The AAAS wants to try the green OA model for its subscription journals as a “one-year experiment to see if this is sustainable,” says Bill Moran, publisher of the Science family of journals.

If the green OA can work in the long term for the publisher (who also publishes a gold OA review, Scientific advances) is “the biggest question we have faced,” he adds. But given that the AAAS already allows manuscript sharing – if not as liberally – he hopes the change won’t mean libraries or other communities cut back on subscriptions that support the company.