Plan S entered into force at the beginning of 2021. Researchers and publishers take stock on the changes in Open Access publishing and explore the future.
In autumn 2018, a group of national research funders with the support of the European Commission, announced the launch of cOAlition S, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access (OA) to research publications a reality. The goals of the initiative are described in Plan S, which consists of ten priorities and an overall target: With effect from 2021, all scientific publications that result from publicly funded research must be published in compliant OA journals or platforms. A goal that may also lead to the ending of journal subscription models. From an initially small group, cOAlition S has gained more support for their endeavour over the years and grown to a respectable group of 18 national science funders and seven charitable international funders and research organisations reaching far beyond Europe and including the World Health Organisation (WHO). All these funders are currently rolling out similar OA mandates.
In April 2021, we are a good quarter of a year into the implementation phase of Plan S. So, what has changed and how is the initiative pushing to remove journal paywalls? An article published by Nature on 8 April, provides a guide to the changes, explaining what is currently happening. Plan S requires that researchers with grants from the cOAlition S funders must make their papers immediately available to read without paywall and publish them under a liberal license so that anyone can download, reuse or republish the paper. They have two options for compliance: they publish OA in a suitable journal, or they make their publication immediately available in a repository. However, there are differences between the funders on how they apply the policy with respect to publication date and the coverage of potential article processing costs. The first compliance route led to subscription journals mostly adapting, so that researchers can still publish with them. They offer OA options charging publishing fees, or allow scientists to post their peer-reviewed manuscripts online. The second route requires authors to publish under a ‘rights retention strategy’ (RRS), so that they retain their right to post their accepted manuscript online after submitting to a journal. However, journals often require a delay before posting online or a restricted license. Since the RRS is dominant to these terms, the only option journals have is turning the respective authors away. A group of more than 50 prominent publishers thus stated that they do not support the RRS route. Despite the challenges, Plan S is changing the OA landscape already; journals offer new immediate OA routes or experiment with new OA business models. There is also a push for making publisher pricing more transparent and discussion on how to prevent the exclusion of disadvantages authors, who do not have the means to pay for publishing costs from a ‘pay per paper’ model. Hybrid journals develop transformative agreements, in which universities or libraries pay fees including OA publications and access to paywalled content. Some even move from ‘per paper’ publishing fees to flat rates allowing to publish ‘as much as you can’ over an entire year. In addition, Plan S might also shift the assessment by metric culture, where researchers are judged based on the number and impact factor of their publications.
Horizon Europe, the upcoming European framework programme for research and innovation, has also tightened its Open Science and OA rules. Research funded under the programme must be published OA without an embargo period either in an OA journal or deposited in a suitable repository at the latest upon publication. The rules are mostly aligned with Plan S, but even stricter with regards to one aspect. While Plan S considers transformative hybrid journals compliant until the end of 2024, fees for publishing in hybrid journals will not be covered by grants from Horizon Europe and only fees for full OA venues are eligible for reimbursement.
With the implementation still in its infancy, Plan S is already pushing the next frontier in OA. In March 2021, together with Science Europe, cOAlition S published a report and recommendations for Diamond Open Access, community-driven OA publishing. The report is based on a study conducted on OA diamond journals, which are free for readers and authors. Based on the challenges faced by the sector, the authors recommend streamlining technical support, building capacity, increasing effectiveness and investing into the future. To kick-start the process, they suggest also some immediate actions including an international workshop on diamond OA within the next six months, setting up an OA diamond funding strategy within a year and building an OA diamond capacity center within two years.