Category Archives: oa.plan_s

Advancing a publicly owned and not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem based on the principles of open science

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“Joint response by the European University Association (EUA), Science Europe, Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), Association of ERC Grantees (AERG), Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc), cOAlition S, OPERAS, and French National Research Agency (ANR). We welcome the adoption by the Council of the European Union (EU) of the conclusions on highquality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing. As key public research and innovation actors in Europe, we are committed to supporting the development of a publicly owned, not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem in collaboration with policymakers in Europe and beyond….”

Webinar – Funding Open Access after the Transformation | 23 May 2023 | OASPA

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“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. …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 and a coalition of UK-based researchers, 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 publishers and will be followed this year by a second webinar focusing on the perspective of funders. The webinar will be chaired by Raym Crow of SPARC and Chain Bridge Group.  Panellists: Vivian Berghahn of Berghahn Books, Evgeniya Lupova-Henry of Quartz OA and Judith Fathallah of Lancaster University. With thanks also to Demmy Verbeke of Leuven University for organising this webinar. …”

Complying with the UKRI open access policy: member experiences – Jisc

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“Complying with the UKRI open access policy: member experiences

Representatives from three HEI libraries will share their experiences of implementing the UKRI OA policy at their institution.”

Principles of Diamond Open Access Publishing: a draft proposal | Plan S

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“The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access outlines a set of priorities to develop sustainable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned scholarly communication. Its goal is to create a global federation of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) journals and platforms around shared principles, guidelines, and quality standards while respecting their cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity. It proposes a definition of Diamond OA as a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Diamond OA is community-driven, academic-led and -owned, and serves a wide variety of generally small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities. 

Still, Diamond OA is often seen as a mere business model for scholarly publishing: no fees for authors or readers. However, Diamond OA can be better characterized by a shared set of values and principles that go well beyond the business aspect. These distinguish Diamond OA communities from other approaches to scholarly publishing. It is therefore worthwhile to spell out these values and principles, so they may serve as elements of identification for Diamond OA communities. 

The principles formulated below are intended as a first draft. They are not cast in stone, and meant to inspire discussion and evolve as a living document that will crystallize over the coming months. Many of these principles are not exclusive to Diamond OA communities. Some are borrowed or adapted from the more general 2019 Good Practice Principles for scholarly communication services defined by Sparc and COAR1, or go back to the 2016 Vienna Principles. Others have been carefully worked out in more detail by the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication in a self-assessment format for scholarly communities. Additional references can be added in the discussion.

The formulation of these principles has benefited from many conversations over the years with various members of the Diamond community now working together in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, cOAlition S, the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects, the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), the Open Library of Humanities, OPERAS, SciELO, Science Europe, and Redalyc-Amelica. This document attempts to embed these valuable contributions into principles defining the ethos of Diamond OA publishing….”

Catching up on open access

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The days of the traditional, subscription-based scholarly journal seem to be numbered. Around the world, research funders are adopting ever-more expansive policies requiring the researchers they fund to make the results of their work freely accessible to the public. Canada, once a leader in this area, risks falling behind its peers unless it moves to keep pace with the latest developments.

Canada’s three federal research-funding agencies – the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) – adopted a joint open access policy in 2015. The policy requires grant recipients to ensure that any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Tri-Agency funding are made publicly available to read for free within 12 months of publishing. Researchers may opt to make their published research accessible either through an online repository (essentially a free digital archive hosted by an institution or an organization) or by publishing in a journal that offers content without a direct cost to readers. But the landscape of scholarly publishing has evolved significantly in the eight years since the Tri-Agency decision, and the open science movement has gained steam. Now, many in the scientific community say Canada’s open access policies are due for a rewrite.

Diamond Open Access 2023 Roadmap | Plan S

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“In the lead-up to the October 2023 Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR) are organising two webinars for the community to prepare discussions for the global summit and to take decisive steps towards a stronger Diamond Open Access ecosystem for scholarly communication.

The ‘Action Plan for Diamond Open Access’ was launched in March 2022. It has since been endorsed by 146 organisations and 138 individuals. To emphasise the global outlook of our community, the Action Plan is now available in Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, with more translations on the way.

First Community Webinar

Monday 17 April, 16.30 – 18.00 CEST

We invite endorsing organisations and individuals of the Action Plan to join us and establish the main topics to be discussed during the Global Summit. Based on the Action Plan and a draft concept note, we will ask you for your views and feedback.

Endorsers of the Action Plan will receive the invitation and registration details. If you are interested in becoming a member of the community and participating, endorsement for the Action Plan is still open.

Second Community Webinar

Monday 18 September 2023, 16.30 – 18.00 CEST

We invite endorsing organisations and individuals of the Action Plan to save this date to discuss the co-creation of global principles for Diamond Open Access. Such principles will be further refined by the community and formally launched during the Global Summit….”

Society and university journal publishers gradually progressing towards new OA models | Impact of Social Sciences

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“Assessing the findings of a recent survey into the publishing practices of independent academic publishers, Danielle Padula, head of marketing and community development at Scholastica, finds these publishers to be moving incrementally towards fully open access models while still working to identify the options with the best long-term growth potential in the wake of recent funder initiatives, such as Plan S and the OSTP ‘Nelson Memo’….”

Editors’ note: On rent extraction in academic publishing and its alternatives | Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

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Abstract:  In this editorial we introduce new members of our editorial team and the contents of this issue. In addition we discuss open access developments of the journal, namely our new license policy, which allows authors to choose a Creative Common license that best suits their needs or the requirements of their funders. This change in licenses makes our journal also compliant with the Plan S programme, which several large European research funders have signed, in order to promote open access publishing. We support such initiatives, but note that they are designed mainly to push large commercial publishers to publish publicly funded research in open access. While the Plan S is a welcome program, commercial for-profit publishers charge exorbitant charges for open access, usually paid for by the researchers’ institutions. We note that these charges are a form of rent extraction, which produces little added value, as the commercial publishers rely on the free labor of researchers and publicly funded research to fill their journals’ pages. More so, due to these charges the public ends up paying again for the research it funded in the first place. We argue that public support for both institutional and independent non-profit open access publishing is a socially more just and sustainable model.

Guest Post – Article Processing Charges are a Heavy Burden for Middle-Income Countries – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Many scientists worldwide have embraced the idea that research publications should be openly accessible to read, without paywalls. Rightfully so, as academic research is mostly supported by public funds, and contributes toward societal progress. Indeed, the quest for open publications has led to many groundbreaking initiatives, including the creation of new author-pays open access (OA) journals and publishers, the expansion of public preprint and postprint repositories, and the establishment of Sci-Hub, a radical open repository of scientific publications, often obtained illegally. But subscription publications persist, as well as resistance toward depositing preprints, leading to more recent initiatives to accelerate the universal transition to OA in scientific publications. Notably, a recent mandate established that US federal agencies must create policies to ensure all peer-reviewed publications are made publicly accessible by the end of 2025. This follows Plan S, launched in 2018 by a consortium of mostly European research funding and performing organizations, which requires that all publications from 2021 on must be OA. An additional mandate within Plan S is that hybrid models of publishing, in which authors can pay to publish OA papers in journals that also publish under subscription models, are acceptable only under certain circumstances, and only until December 31st, 2024. This means that major subscription journals wishing to publish work by authors with Plan S funding will need to transition to OA-only by 2025….”

cOAlition S supports efforts to improve copyright framework for research | Plan S

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“Copyright retention has been at the core of Plan S since its inception. Its first principle is that authors or their institutions retain copyright to their work. The Rights Retention Strategy aims to ensure that authors retain their rights and comply with funders´ mandates of immediate open access under open licenses while publishing in the venue of their choice.  

cOAlition S welcomes the various rights retention strategies adopted by research funders and institutions, as well as efforts to improve copyright legislation for research. These include the introduction of Secondary Publication Rights in national copyright legislation, and the European Research Area policy work to identify barriers to access to and reuse of scientific publications in EU copyright legislation and propose legislative and non-legislative measures.  

cOAlition S is also supportive of exploring an EU Secondary Publication Right, advancing towards sustainable universal open access on an international scale, e.g. statutory licensing, and suggestions for mandatory clauses for scientific publishing agreements via contract law, mandatory reversion rights, EU harmonisation of first ownership, and mandatory and stronger exceptions and limitations for research (see: https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/891665 and https://zenodo.org/record/7148721).”

Plan S Annual Review 2022

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“At cOAlition S, we are committed to accelerating the transition to open access. As an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations, along with the European Commission, we have been rolling out policies and tools since 2018 to achieve the goal of Plan S. In this annual report, we are presenting an overview of our activities in 2022, as well as the latest news on our policies, tools, and services. We also outline our support for various publishing models and highlight specific initiatives of cOAlition S funders. In the last section, we give a preview of our plans for 2023 as we look towards the future of scholarly communication….”