The European Commission’s senior advisor on Open Access, Robert-Jan Smits, in conjunction with two European research leaders and the publisher of Plan S, have formed a task force to achieve the goal of moving the European Union toward the requirement of immediate Open Access for scientific papers after publication, by the year 2020. The group has recently visited the United States to garner support from US policymakers in the attempt to make this a global effort.
Plan S proposes a Gold, Libre-Access standard for European researchers. It seeks to require scientists who receive funding from 11 national research funders, to make the subsequently published research both free to read and available for others to translate, expand upon, or reuse. Plan S would prohibit funded researchers from publishing in hybrid and other journals that require a paid subscription to access, or those that charge authors a fee if they wish to be published openly. This plan would eliminate 85% of possible scientific journals as publication options unless those publishers agree to adjust their business models to become OA.
Plan S goals are in line with Peter Suber’s assessment of the OA goals of removing monetary and permission barriers, making the research available for others, and enabling scientific progress. Removing the fee structure makes research created in the EU available to all other researchers who can virtually access it, and removing the permissions barriers allows the work to be translated, and used, and built upon by researchers in other nations.
While researchers can agree that “greater openness, access, and transparency will greatly benefit both knowledge production and society as a whole,” there is pushback from both scientific authors and publishers, both of whom are attempting creative workarounds to meet their own needs while adhering to the requirements of Plan S (Kamerlin, Wittung-Stafshede, Dey, et al., 2018). Plan S’ creators are more concerned with the end goal of making all funded research OA than they are with how the goal is accomplished. For regular journals, this can be achieved by continuing to charge for access to papers, while simultaneously allowing the paper to be made available for free outside of the paywall. However, this option would still preclude hybrid journals from charging fees to authors for an OA publication option.
Some opponents believe that Plan S impinges on academic freedom by dictating where researchers can publish. Scientist Leonid Schneider hosted a co-authored article by several European and US scientists on his website “For Better Science” which countered Plan S, citing an “influx of lower quality papers” and a disadvantage to EU researchers as some of the overlooked issues, and offered their own “safer” suggestions for how to create the Open Science, Plan S wants.
Co-author, New Jersey Institute of Technology Assistant Professor, James Holbrook was quoted in Else’s article, calling Plan S, “unethical” and later published a follow-up blog, reiterating his reasoning. Suber, when asked specifically about Plan S, disagrees with Holbrook’s assessment, saying that, “it is reasonable for funders to restrict how their money is used (Else, p.174),” and states this unequivocally in his book. (Suber, p.23).
While the goal of creating a global Open Science initiative can be seen as controversial, the article shows a good faith effort at achieving the OA goals highlighted in Suber’s text – that is, insomuch that it is possible, unimpeded access to knowledge and information.
References
Else, H. (2018). Europe’s open-access plan seeks US support. Nature, 562(7726), 174.
Holbrook, J. B. (2018, September 18). What’s “unethical” about Plan S? [Web log post]. Retrieved
January 27, 2019, from https://jbrittholbrook.com/2018/09/18/whats-unethical-about-plan-s/
Kamerlin, L., Wittung-Stafshede, P., Dey, A., Wells, S. A., Gruden, M., Van der Kamp, M. W., . . . Hay,
S. (2018, October 22). Response to Plan S from academic researchers: Unethical, too risky! Retrieved January 27, 2019, from https://forbetterscience.com/2018/09/11/response-to-plan-s-from-academic-researchers-unethical-too-risky/
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