In open access, two major funders will not cover publication in hybrid journals | Science

Plan S, the open access initiative launched by the European Commission and Science Europe in September, brought together two new major members. The Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, two of the largest private foundations in the world that support research, today announced joining a consortium of eleven European funding agencies demanding that funded research be immediately and freely readable for publication.

The two new partners significantly strengthen funding efforts to force scientists to publish their articles in journals that make their content free for the public, instead of charging subscriptions. The current partners of the Plan S coalition, represented by Science Europe, jointly spend about $ 8.7 billion on research. Wellcome, headquartered in London, funds about $ 1.3 billion in biomedical research a year, while the Seattle-based Gates Foundation spends more than $ 1.2 billion on health research and development across the country. the world.

The biggest part of the policy change is that from January 2020, Wellcome and Gates will no longer cover the cost of their beneficiaries publishing in so-called hybrid open access journals, which offer both free content and a subscription. Most scientific journals now follow this hybrid business model, which allows authors to pay fees if they wish to make their articles accessible to everyone. Over the last decade, Wellcome has allowed its beneficiaries to pay these fees, including considering them as a way to help publishers finance the transition from their business models to full operation. "We do not believe it's a transition any more," says Robert Kiley, Wellcome's Director of Open Research. "We seek to bring about a change in which all research is freely available."

Wellcome will make two additional changes that were already part of the Gates Foundation Open Access Policy: all items must be available under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCBY) to facilitate reuse of content, and the research must be available immediately and free of charge. publication. (Wellcome's current policy allows a publisher to keep an article behind a paywall for 6 months and does not require a Creative Commons license.)

Authors funded by either foundation may comply with this by publishing open access journals. Or, if they publish in a paid newspaper, they must simultaneously add their accepted manuscript to open PubMed Central or Europe PMC repositories.Some journals called "green" free access allow this immediate archiving. However, most leading journals such as Nature, Cell and Science do not allow this at least six months after publication. (If the research relates to a disease outbreak or other public health emergency, authors should also publish a prior impression prior to any peer review.) Although the Wellcome policy technically allows for publication in hybrid journals – with the condition immediate archiving in PMC or EPMC – Plan S principles specifically exclude hybrid journals.

The new policies, also from Wellcome, differ from the Plan S principles with respect to the cost of article processing for OA journals. Plan S aspires to cap these fees to a certain amount, but Wellcome, noting that publishers are improving the quality of their items, plans to continue paying fees deemed "reasonable" by the foundation. (Gates is revising its fee policy.)

Robert-Jan Smits, OA's envoy to the commission in Brussels and eminent advocate of Plan S, said in a statement that, by joining the effort, Gates and Wellcome "make an important contribution for the purpose of Plan S to accelerate the transition and immediate open access to scientific publications. "

Clarification, November 5, 2:00 pm: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Wellcome and Gates would prohibit their recipients from publishing in open access hybrid journals. This will in fact still be allowed, but no foundation will cover the fees charged by these journals to make these articles freely available. The policy notes an exception for some hybrid journals until the end of 2021.