Plan S
What does the Web of Science tell us about Plan S?
He admitted that the strength of Plan S is
also its weakness; just 10 basic principles, so cOAlition S decided to come up with more implementation guidance, which has been put out to public consultation: ‘Let me be clear: we are not going to suddenly change these 10 principles, or change our objective, but we do want to provide clarity, where we did not do so originally. We are quite clear we want to shift to a new system of publishing.’
Smits spelled out the three ways to be
compliant with Plan S: • Publish in high-quality open access journals/platforms;
• Deposit in open access repositories without embargo; or
• Publish in a hybrid journal that is subject to transformative agreement. The journal must be committed to a full OA transition within a period of four years.
He continued: ‘We have also heard there are issues in some fields of science, where there is no suitable open access journal in which to publish. To this end we are undertaking gap analysis, where this proves to be the case, we will provide incentives to set up suitable journals or platforms. ‘On the subject of APCs, I am firmly
advocating that there should be a cap on APCs; however we decided to adopt the Wellcome Trust approach and to say that APCs should be “reasonable”. We are going to do an in-depth study into what should be considered reasonable, but I am very much of the opinion the charge should be based on the service provided by the publisher.’ Smits concluded: ‘I had never expected
Plan S to get so much attention, and the fact it is being debated around the world shows that people think there is change in the air, and that it is time for something new. That’s why it is important that all of us – particularly publishers – come clean: do you believe that the results of publicly-funded research should no longer be behind expensive paywalls? Secondly, do you think it’s time for your businesses to move to new models based on OA? Answer these two questions with a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and you will make everyone happy – particularly me.’
Videos of the main presentations from APE are at
www.ape2019.eu/videorecordings
www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo Y
Nandita Quaderi summarises findings from The Plan S footprint: Implications for the Scholarly Publishing Landscape
ou’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the new
disruptor in publishing and academic research. Plan S, the new initiative
from cOAlition S, launched in September, aims to transform scientific discovery by ensuring research is freely accessible to readers. Plan S will require researchers who benefit from funding or grants from cOAlition S members to publish in open repositories or journals where all papers are publicly accessible with no subscription. This is usually possible via payment of article processing charges (APCs). The consultation period on the implementation guidelines recently ended and has generated some discussion, to say the least – more than 600 individuals and organisations provided responses to the official consultation, and the Open Access Tracking Project run by Peter Suber, at Harvard, has tagged 456 items on Plan S. Publisher member associations, including ALPSP and the STM Association, have raised concerns about the accelerated pace of change to an industry already in transition, and asked for clarity regarding the details of implementation.
But much of the commentary thus far has been qualitative or anecdotal, not data-driven. To remedy this, using data
from more than 1.9 million papers across 20,000 journals in Web of Science Core Collection, we filtered for journal content published in 2017 classified as research or review articles (as these are the main document types covered by the Plan S proposals.) We examined perspectives related to funders, disciplines, countries, publishers, and journals. The results are in a report from the Institute for Scientific Information: The Plan S footprint: Implications for the Scholarly Publishing Landscape, that is free to download.
Publishers and Plan S There are 4,900 publishers in Web of Science that have one or more journals in the dataset, but there is a significant variance in scale, with the largest 20 per cent of publishers accounting for more than 90 per cent of papers analysed in our study. More than 3,500 publishers had no Plan S papers, and a further 1,120 published 10 or fewer papers acknowledging Plan S funding.
“More than 3,500 publishers had no Plan S papers”
April/May 2019 Research Information 19
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