“There is “still a long way to go” before the open-access initiative Plan S achieves its aims, even though it has already “rocked the world of scientific publishing off its feet”, according to its founder….
Under Plan S, a group of mainly European research funders is requiring papers reporting work they have funded to be made openly available immediately and under certain conditions, such as that authors must retain the rights over their work.
The plan was developed in 2018 by Smits, a former European Commission director-general of research and now president of the executive board of Eindhoven University of Technology, in his final year at the EU institution as its open-access envoy.
In the book, co-written with journalist Rachael Pells, Smits describes a “frustrating” meeting with representatives of major academic publishers early in his envoy role, where he was tasked with developing a plan to speed up the transition to open access. “I’d thought, perhaps naively, that there would be a willingness to really work together,” he says, adding that as he listened to the reaction from publishers, he realised his job was “not going to be as easy as I’d hoped”.
Elsewhere in the book, Robert Kiley, head of strategy for Plan S and a former head of open research at the Wellcome Trust—which is among the funders implementing Plan S—says that academics “don’t need journals” any more now that they have the internet.
Kiley says that academia should move entirely to the model being pioneered by funders and institutions including Wellcome and the EU: publication on online platforms of preprints ahead of peer review, followed by open peer review and rounds of improvements….”
