Plan S, launched in September 2018, is an initiative to “make full and immediate Open Access a reality”.
It is supported by a group of national research funders, European and international organisations and charitable foundations which have agreed to adopt the mission and principles of Plan S. Together, they are known as CoalitionS. UKRI was one of the early signatories to PlanS. Its Open Access requirements are intrinsically linked to the principles outlined by PlanS. The number of supporters grew over the past 5 years and key funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation have aligned their open access policies with the aims of the coalition.
It is built on 10 key principles and has one objective to make all scholarly publications emerging from publicly funded research available Open Access, either via Open Access journals, Open Access platforms or Open Access repositories.
The 10 principles of PlanS aim to challenge the traditional publication model for scholarly communications, and over the past 5 five years has influenced and forced publishers to offer solutions for open access.
PlanS invites a wider reflection about the way in which scholarly communication has been done so far. In particular, it outlines the need for researchers to stay in control of their research by ensuring they retain copyright instead of handing it over to publishers. It insists on the need for research to be easily reusable which entails not locking it behind reserved rights. Instead, it advocates for the use of Creative Commons licence with attribution (CC-BY). This allows other researchers and stakeholders to use the research while still giving credit to authors. It highlights the need for a research culture that assesses research on its own merit rather than on the merit of the venue of publication eschewing metrics such as high impact factor in line with DORA principles. These metrics largely reliant on number of citations do little as a measure of research quality and are skewed towards STEM disciplines and publications in English. PlanS supports varied models of publication and in particular the model of diamond open access to counter the controversial and costly APCs. These risk making publishing the preserve of the few wealthy researchers and their institutions. They also call for pricing transparency when APCs are charged.
PlanS has been an important mover in Europe and in a recent announcement pushes for further reforms of scholarly publishing to give researchers more control and power over where and when to publish their work. In addition, it encourages opening up the process of publication including peer-review. This model of publication would be non-profit and free to authors. They encourage through their Towards Responsible Publishing proposal a model of ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ whereby scholarly literature would be opened. Authors would place their work on pre-prints platforms, these would be submitted for peer-review, and all the material from the process would be openly available. In doing this they support models such as those describe in two previous blogs: Pre-prints and Open Review and Octopus.
PlanS has been an important mover towards Open Access, but recognises that their activities might have encouraged the charging of APCs which is counter to their ambitions. With their new announcement, they aim to support new models of publishing that truly support researchers and research.
With their new proposal, PlanS is keen to survey the community of researchers. Take the time to read the proposal and take the survey to help shape the next stage of Open Access campaigning.