As Plan S moves ahead, stakeholders ask for careful implementation and good coherence with the Open Access policy of Horizon Europe.
After the consultation on the Plan S implementation guidance closed in February, cOAlition S is now moving full speed ahead on the road to Open Access. On 9 May 2019, they published a joint statement together with Open Access 2020, a global alliance of more than 130 rectors’ conferences, national library consortia, research organisations and funding bodies, and called for research funding and research performing organisations to work together to accelerate the transition to Open Access. Even before, at the very beginning of the month, as an outcome of a discussion at the annual meeting of the Global Research Council in Brazil, cOAlition S already issued the Sâo Paulo Statement, thereby joining forces with the African Open Science Platform, AmeLICA, SciELO and Open Access 2020. These five major Open Access initiatives all agree that access to the global public good of scientific knowledge is a universal right, unrestricted and immediate Open Access must include re-use, and that the common goal of Open Access can be achieved through a variety of approaches. To this aim, the initiatives will pursue points of alignment and cooperation to reach their objective and seek an active dialogue with the global scholarly community. As a next step, cOAlition S will publish their revised implementation guidance still this month. Several stakeholders seized the opportunity to publish their own statements ahead.
Building on their submission to the Plan S consultation, where they already asked for clarification on implementation aspects, The Guild has published their own recommendations for a successful transition to Open Access on 2 May. The Guild calls especially for universities, as the hubs of publicly funded research, to be at the centre of the Open Access implementation debate, and outlines key elements to avoid potential disruptive consequences of Plan S. Among these elements are a staged approach to implementation giving many opportunities for dialogue between the different stakeholders, and the focus on positive rewards instead of sanctions for non-compliance with Open Access. Further, The Guild wants to support sustainable Open Access models to maximise the benefits of research, and eliminate any obstacles to knowledge circulation by enabling researchers to use the most effective publishing vehicles. This also means ensuring flexible licensing in order to take the needs of specific disciplines into account. In view of the upcoming new framework programme for research and innovation, Horizon Europe, the Guild also calls upon the European Commission to ensure coherence between Plan S and the Open Access modus operandi in Horizon Europe to avoid a fragmentation of the research landscape.
In a recent article by Science Business, Open Access advocates and Open Access publishers, among them the science publisher F1000, ask for Plan S to keep its original ambition and make all journal papers free to read by 2020. They claim that viable, high-quality alternatives to subscription journals already exist and Plan S is an excellent effort to pull down paywalls, if it stays with its principles. With cOAlition S growing and support from big players like China and India, chances also grow that subscription-based publishers will give in and change their business models. However, groups of scientists had voiced concern over Plan S and feared that the approach will limit their choice of where to publish. The revised implementation guidelines of Plan S, taking into account the feedback from the consultation period may thus include some tweaks and more flexibility to some aspects of the original plan, because you ‘don’t do a consultation and then change nothing’ as the former Plan S champion and initiator Robert Ian Smits says. However, it seems that the ten principles of the plan will not be touched.
Maybe Europeans should also cast a look to the East when it comes to Open Access implementation. A study published by Nature on 17 May claims that the world leader in Open Access is Indonesia, with 81% of the published articles being available to read for-free.