“The November 2023 Open Science Roundup is dedicated to the ‘Year of Open Science’ as we review significant developments in the Open Science movement. This month, we also feature insights from André Brasil, a researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), on trailblazing initiatives for Open Access.”
“Take cOAlition S’s survey by the November 29th deadline to support a new model of publishing
cOAlition S, an initiative of more than 2 dozen national funders and charitable organizations, has recently released the “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal.
The two key features of this proposal, as stated in an introductory blog post, are:
1. Authors, not third-party suppliers, decide when and what to publish.
In such a ‘scholar-led’ publishing system, third-party suppliers can still offer and charge for services that facilitate peer review, publication and preservation. However, they will not block scholars from sharing their work at any stage during the research and dissemination process.
2. The scholarly record includes the full range of outputs created during the research cycle, and not just the final journal-accepted version.
By making early article versions and peer review feedback critical elements of the scholarly record, a future scholarly communication system can capture research ‘in the act’. Shining a light on how research progresses towards increasingly trustworthy knowledge creation offers opportunities for reviewing and filtering scholarly outputs for the purposes of curation and research assessment.
Towards Responsible Publishing…”
“The open science movement has fueled the development of public access options, including open access journals, preprint servers, open peer review, and open data and data repositories. Journals that have paywalls are often hybrid models that offer authors ways to make their articles available through “gold” open access and “green” open access options (
Citation6).
To address the growing requirements for public access, journal publishers are implementing new peer-reviewed article types that support the objectives of open science by extending access to relevant assets such as datasets, research protocols, and advances in research methods, toward the goal of fostering new collaborations across disciplines….”
Five regulars at the Scholarly Kitchen weigh in on cOAlition S plan for Responsible Publishing.
“When publishers first introduced APCs, the expectation was that these fees would be relatively small and a temporary measure that would provide an incentive for publishers to move to open access. “It’s one of those things that looked like a good idea at the time,” says Johan Rooryck, executive director of cOAlition S, a group of research funders and organizations supporting the shift to immediate open-access academic publishing. The coalition developed Plan S, a 2018 agreement originating in Europe, whereby research funders mandate full open access for the work that emerges from their support….”
“Plans have been announced to expand an open access model that could affect all medical and scientific journals by giving authors far greater control over publishing.
A group of research funding agencies called Coalition S has published proposals for the next step in its plan to strengthen a model of full and immediate open access science publishing known as Plan S.1 The plan encourages a move towards “responsible” science publication without paywalls, with the aim of creating a more efficient publishing system that has fairer pricing and access….”
“A new push for a more equitable scientific publishing system is in the making as the proponents of ‘diamond’ open access – under which neither authors or readers would pay the publishers – weigh up joining forces in a global federation.
The idea for a federation was first proposed last month when researchers, policymakers, publishers and research funders gathered at the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access in Mexico.
For a week, they discussed how to best support the fragile and thinly distributed diamond open access ecosystem. By the end of the summit, UNESCO representatives had given the impromptu plan to form a federation their backing. “We had no clear expectationsthis was going to be the outcome,” says Lidia Borrell-Damian, secretary general of Science Europe, the body representing national funding agencies and one of the organisers of the summit….”
Only this snippet is OA: “Publishers face being ‘mere service providers’ under new vision, but critics question whether global adoption of proposals will be any wider than their predecessors.”
“On Tuesday—Halloween here in the US—cOAlition S released a new open access blueprint, one that, in effect, proposes to dismantle the prevailing journal system. Under an anodyne title (“Toward Responsible Publishing”), the group of (mostly) European state funders and foundations endorsed a future for scholarly communication in which publishers are recast as competing service providers. It’s also in basic alignment with the movement to shift peer review to a post-publication phase—with curation and discoverability detached from the per-title, periodic-release journal system. The third major pillar of the plan is to de-throne the version-of-record article (and, implicitly, the monograph), by granting other outputs (like datasets and reviews) equal footing in the realm of recognition.
The plan, to borrow a phrase from Joe Biden, is a BFD.
In this post, I want to make three quick points, which I hope to expand on soon. The first is that the Plan S initiative represents an uneasy convergence between two strands of the nonprofit, mission-driven OA world: between (1) those who’ve championed scholar-submitted preprints and post-prints to open repositories, coupled with an emergent post-release review ecosystem; and (2) advocates of nonprofit, fee-free OA publishing, who tend to employ the traditional version-of-record journal and book formats. The distinction, in the bizarre lingo we’ve inherited, is green versus diamond.
I don’t want to exaggerate the differences between these two approaches. There’s a shared belief, most crucially, that the academic community should restore custody over the scholarly publishing system—wrench it back, that is, from the oligopolists. A second shared tenet is that an OA system based on APCs (or their read-and-publish equivalent) is arguably worse than the tolled system it seeks to replace. APC-based OA trades barriers to readers for barriers to authors, with the right to publish meted out according to institutional wealth or national origin. So that’s a lot of agreement: a nonprofit, community-led system that doesn’t exclude authors.
Still, the differences are important. The green route—sometimes termed Publish, Review, Curate (PRC), in that order—aims to replace the journal system altogether. The diamond route, by contrast, seeks to fix that system.1
The rethought Plan S leans green….”
“The group behind the radical open-access initiative Plan S has announced its next big plan to shake up research publishing — and this one could be bolder than the first. It wants all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports to be published openly from the outset, without authors paying any fees, and for authors, rather than publishers, to decide when and where to first publish their work….”
“Driven by the same “duty of care for the good functioning of the science system” that inspired Plan S, the funders forming cOAlition S are now exploring a new vision for scholarly communication; a vision that holds the promise of being more effective, affordable, and equitable, ultimately benefiting society as a whole.
Our vision is a community-based scholarly communication system fit for open science in the 21st, that empowers scholars to share the full range of their research outputs and to participate in new quality control mechanisms and evaluation standards for these outputs….
To address these and other shortcomings, the new proposal is anchored in two key concepts that extend Plan S:
1. Authors, not third-party suppliers, decide when and what to publish.
In such a ‘scholar-led’ publishing system, third-party suppliers can still offer and charge for services that facilitate peer review, publication and preservation. However, they will not block scholars from sharing their work at any stage during the research and dissemination process.
2. The scholarly record includes the full range of outputs created during the research cycle, and not just the final journal-accepted version.
By making early article versions and peer review feedback critical elements of the scholarly record, a future scholarly communication system can capture research ‘in the act’. Shining a light on how research progresses towards increasingly trustworthy knowledge creation offers opportunities for reviewing and filtering scholarly outputs for the purposes of curation and research assessment….”
“In our time, more and more knowledge disseminated openly and free. At present, there are over 20 000 journals in the world that publish with Open Access. The Open Access movement and ultimately Plan S are a natural and timely evolution for academic publishing and dissemination of research findings. It clearly has many noble intentions. However, it has also opened up for more uncontrolled publishing, and there have and will be challenges down the road before full and fair implementation. In this editorial, we have highlighted different perspectives on the matter from the views of publishers, universities, funders, authors, and readers/users.”
“OASPA is pleased to announce our next webinar — part two in our Funding Open Access after the Transformation series —which will focus on the perspective of funders.
At its launch in 2018, cOAlition S announced that its members would, for a “transition period,” fund open access fees for journals covered by “transformative” agreements. That move helped to establish read-and-publish deals as the leading OA business model, despite criticism that the agreements prop up the author-pays APC system. The same author-pays business model has, despite this opposition, also gained traction to fund the publication of OA books (through BPCs).
As cOAlition S recently communicated, the transition period is ending; beginning in 2025, funders adhering to Plan S will no longer support the agreements. What is more, a growing chorus of stakeholders, including the Ivy Plus librarians in the US, a coalition of UK-based researchers, and the Council of the European Union, are calling for an alternative, collective funding model for OA. At the same time, collective funding experiments as well as conditional open models (such as Subscribe to Open)—in which neither authors nor readers pay—are reporting promising results around the globe.
This webinar features perspectives on the emerging landscape of collective and conditional open models from funders, as a follow up to May’s webinar focused on publishers….”
“On behalf of cOAlition S the team at Information Power developed a fairer global pricing framework and tool, based on open and transparent data, that can be used across the spectrum of publishing business models. The team emphasizes the need for close dialogue between stakeholders and careful use of the tool to ensure the framework is deployed in ways that work well for customers and advance equity. If applied without dialogue, transparency, and in alignment with shared principles then differential pricing can be – and has been – wielded as a blunt instrument to do ill.
Once you have read the report which is available via the cOAlition S website, we would be grateful if you would complete this survey. Based on feedback received during this consultation, we will finalize the framework and tool.
In a nutshell:
* To ensure equity from the beginning, publishers can use the framework for new services.
* To improve equity, publishers might want to shift existing services to this new framework. This might be challenging, and so a Fairer Pricing Tool is available to help publishers explore the most suitable banding and model the impact on different customers.
* Exchange rate fluctuations can be a barrier to equity in some countries. Publishers could help customers by converting prices once a year into local currencies. These local prices would be fixed for 12 months….”
“cOAlition S is pleased to announce that the tender process for a study to assess the impact of Plan S on the global scholarly communication ecosystem has been successfully completed. The tender has been awarded to scidecode science consulting, an international team of experts with extensive consulting experience and project work within the scholarly communication domain.
To assess the impact Plan S has had on the scholarly communication ecosystem and on facilitating research to be published Open Access, scidecode will follow a multifaceted approach, encompassing both quantitative econometrics and a qualitative methodology based on desk research, a comprehensive literature analysis, and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders. These stakeholders will include research funders, advocates for institutional Open Access initiatives, publishers and researchers.
The study is anticipated to deliver valuable insights into the effectiveness of cOAlition S in achieving its objectives. and provide actionable recommendations to improve and expand upon these. The findings and recommendations are expected to be published in mid-2024….”