In win for open access, two major funders will not cover publishing in hybrid journals | Science

Plan S, the open-access (OA) initiative launched by the European Commission and Science Europe in September, has gained two major new members. The Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-two of the world's largest private-funded organizations are now joining a consortium of 11 European funding agencies for their research.

The two new partners add a lot of funding to the effort to make their journals more competitive. The existing Plan S coalition partners, represented by Science Europe, collectively spend about $ 8.7 billion on research. Wellcome, based in London, funds about $ 1.3 billion in biomedical research per year, Seattle-based, Washington-based Gates Foundation spends more than $ 1.2 billion on global health R & D.

The largest part of the policy is that as of January 2020, and it will not be too expensive to publish the OA journals, which has both subscription and free content. Most scientific journals now follow that hybrid business model, which allows authors to pay a fee if they want to make their OA articles. For the past decade, it's a good idea to get your hands on these fees, in part because it's a switch to their business models to full OA. "We do not believe it's a transition," says Robert Kiley, head of open research at Wellcome. "We're looking forward to a change where all research is open access."

These are some of the most important aspects of the Gates Foundation that are already available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Program. (Current Wellcome Policy allows a publisher to keep an article behind a paywall for 6 months.

Can be satisfied by publishing in OA journals. Now, if they publish in a paywalled journal, they must still accept their accepted manuscript to the open repositories PubMed Central (PMC) or Europe PMC (EPMC). Some so called "green" OA journals permit this immediate archiving. But most top-tier journals Nature, Cell, and Science do not allow this until at least 6 months after publication. (If the research is related to a disease outbreak or a public health emergency, then authors must also post a preprint before peer review.) Although the policy is technically permitting publication in hybrid journals with the condition of immediate archiving in PMC or EPMC- the principles of Plan S specifically exclude hybrid journals.

The new policies, also from Wellcome, differ from the Plan S principles with respect to article processing fees for OA journals. Plan S aspires to cape these fees at a certain amount, but Wellcome, noting that publishers vary in how much they enhance articles, plans to continue to pay whatever fees the foundation deems "reasonable." (Gates is reviewing its policy on fees.)

Robert-Jan Smits, OA sent with the commission in Brussels and a prominent advocate of Plan S, said in a statement that by joining the effort, Gates and Wellcome "make an important contribution to the objective of Plan S to accelerate the transition to full and immediate Open Access to scientific publications. "

* Clarification, November 5, 2 p.m .: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that Wellcome and Gates would have their grantees from publishing in hybrid OA journals. This will still be permitted, but nothing will be done by these journals to make those articles OA. The policy notes an exception for some hybrid journals until the end of 2021.