Ambitious S plan in open access delayed to allow the research community to adapt

Some scientific organizations have heavily pushed open access funded research into the publication – Plan S – through the research they funded, was delayed by one year. The agencies announced today that funders would no longer have to implement this initiative before 2021, in order to give researchers and publishers more time to adapt to the changes required by the bold plan.

Donors, also known as Coalition S, are also willing to give publishers greater flexibility in how they turn paid or partially paid journals into open-access titles to comply with Plan S, without imposing of limit. the costs of publishing open access journals, as previously indicated. The group of 19 primarily European funders behind the plan made the changes after a public consultation that brought together hundreds of responses from publishers, academic libraries and researchers (see "Five Key Changes"). of Plan S ").

"The researchers judged that 2020 was too ambitious. The publishers really wanted to change, "said Marc Schiltz, president of Science Europe, a Brussels-based advocacy group that represents European research agencies and officially launched the policy last year.

"It gives more flexibility to those who have to make that transition," says Paul Ayris, director of library services at University College London. "But 2021 will always be a challenge."

The S coalition also added a principle to the plan that states that when they determine who to fund, agencies ignore the prestige of the journals in which researchers publish. This change responded to arguments that it would be difficult for scientists to change their publishing behavior if the profession's reward system still relies heavily on publishing in highly selective and prestigious journals, many of which currently have paywalls. .

This insistence could deter some members of the scientific community from resisting the project, says Robert-Jan Smits, the original architect of Plan S and director of the Eindhoven University of Technology to Netherlands.

Several publishers, including Wiley and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science, have welcomed the backlog and policy changes, but some say the plan still poses challenges.

Reply to comments

Coalition donors – including UK, French and Swedish national agencies, Wellcome Trust in London and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington – reviewed more than 600 responses to implementation guidelines. published last November.

The principle of the policy remains the same: as of 1 January 2021, research documents resulting from work financed by these agencies must be freely accessible at the time of publication. Researchers may publish in open access journals or online platforms that comply with Plan S rules, or publish their published article or accepted peer-reviewed manuscript in an approved open repository under a liberal publication license. However, many subscription journals – including Nature and Science – currently do not allow researchers to post articles or manuscripts in public immediately after publication. In other words, researchers funded by Plan S agencies will not be able to publish their models.

In the review, funders have changed one of the most controversial aspects of Plan S: the way they offer "hybrid" journals, which allows some articles to have paid access but to keep others behind the payroll wall, will be gradually removed. As before, Plan S agencies will cover the costs of publishing open-access articles in these journals until 2024 (now postponed from 2023), and only if these journals are part of agreements that the Coalition S considers it "transformers" because publishers have committed to make titles open to access on a defined time scale. (Some "reading and publishing contracts" between publishers and library consortia, covering the cost of open access publishing in journal groups in particular, could be considered a transformation.)

But the coalition now claims to be willing to consider individual hybrid journals as "transformers" outside these agreements – and therefore in line with Plan S – as long as the titles have a defined plan to publish more open access documents over a given period of time. . This room for maneuver could give some subscription journals a new path to open access.

In response to the changes, Steven Inchcoombe, Publishing Director at Springer Nature, said this route could pave the way for an open access option for its flagship title, Nature. Inchcoombe had proposed the idea of ​​"transformative journals" in a blog post earlier this month, in which he also proposed that Springer Nature as a whole could be qualified as a "transforming publisher" – so that all its journals comply with Plan S – if increased membership in free access in all its journals. (NatureThe press team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)

Springer Nature's concepts are "interesting," but Plan S agencies are still waiting to see and evaluate the firm's commitments to its open-access ideas, says John-Arne Røttingen, head of the Norwegian Research Council. and one of the leaders of the group. group deciding how donors will implement Plan S.

Transparent pricing

Plan S's funders also modified their proposal to limit the costs of open-access publishing by limiting the cost of processing articles. Rather than automatically imposing a ceiling, funders are now asking magazines to be more transparent about the cost of publishing articles, although they may still introduce a limit. "We do not want to pay for the value of the brand, we want to pay for the services," says Røttingen.

A handful of other changes concern the rules on public copyright licensing and other open access publishing mechanisms. The guidelines now allow researchers to use slightly more restrictive open licenses when publishing their work in undefined circumstances. This could allay the concerns of some publishers and researchers who oppose the extremely open licenses that allow anyone to reuse the text of a job.

And donors have changed the wording on open access publishing mechanisms, which do not include publication fees, to clarify that these options are acceptable ways to comply with Plan S; critics said the S Coalition had so far paid them little attention. These routes include online posting of peer-reviewed manuscripts, or the use of journals or platforms that are free to read and publish, for example because their costs are covered by government grants.

Inchcoombe indicates that Springer Nature is deeply concerned about allowing researchers to immediately archive accepted manuscripts online under a liberal license because "this could have serious unintended consequences" – for example, "commercial reuse of research primary by others no contribution to the production of the work ".

Other editors also continue to express reservations about Plan S despite the changes. Emma Wilson, director of publication at the Royal Society of British Cambridge Cambridge, believes that additional measures are needed to mitigate the unintended consequences and potential costs for unfunded researchers.

A Wiley spokesperson also argued that the "general requirements" of the plan could limit the publisher's ability to support transitions allowing open access in other communities.

Plan S remains "extremely exciting and ambitious", but it still faces major hurdles, says Ayris. Donors support only a small portion of the research in the world, he said, and unless more agencies register, it might be difficult to obtain open global access.