Open Access Publishing: Plan S Update
I haven’t had time to go through the details yet, but yesterday saw the release of revised Principles and Implemenation for Plan S, which I have blogged about before, e.g. here. There’s also a rationale for the changes here.
For those of you who have never heard of Plan S, it For those that haven’t it is a proposal by funding agencies from 11 European Nations to give the public free access to publicly funded science. The 11 countries involved in this initiative are: France, Italy, Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, and the UK. Together, these nations compise `cOAlition S’ – the `OA’ is for `Open Access’ – to carry out the plan.
The principal change is that the deadline for implementation has been moved back a year, which is sensible as the original deadline of January 2020 was never going to be feasible. The principal principle is however unchanged:
With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.
I’ll go through the revised guidelines when I get time but in the meantime if you can are so minded you can read them yourself and comment thereon through the comments box below.
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In the Dark 
May 31, 2019 at 11:06 am
What is the difference with gold/green open access? We get to
hear these terms now and then or may be I am confusing them something else. Some journals I think do provide open access
but then author needs to pay extra to retains the copy right.
In medical journals where the published results are more
directly linked to business interests can the journals be sued
for publishing misleading results, once the copy right is
transferred? In physics/astronomy if universities make a rule
that all accepted papers are resubmitted to arXiv then why
we need open access? Libraries can simply discontinue the
subscription and authors will be under pressure to use arXiv
more meaningfully. Universities can help by not giving
any weights to papers not on the arXiv when going through
CVs in job application?
May 31, 2019 at 2:08 pm
Definitions of “Green” and “Gold” open access can easily be found on the web but in a nutshell:
“self-archiving” of published material so that it is freely available to the public is “Green” open-access
paying the publisher to make the article freely available to the public is “Gold” open-access.
The problem with using the arxiv only is that the arxiv does not undertake peer review. The solution, which we have adopted in the Open Journal of Astrophysics, is to provide an overlay to the arXiv that undertakes peer-review (free of charge to the authors).
May 31, 2019 at 2:37 pm
Is peer review really needed?
For experiments the data should be made publicly available
and anyone can test it subsequently. Theoretical results
can be debated more easily.
Referees are not always correct. I am sure there are
counter arguments but refereeing process also has many inherent issues. Many journals never publish the
statistics about the ethnicity/gender/nationality
of authors/referees which can be used to test
presence/absence of subconscious bias.
The editorial board of
many “international” journals lack representation from
minorities and women. These issues are being debated
more openly in educational institutions, but less so
for the constitution of editorial boards of many journals.
Though everything including hiring process and
promotion of academics is eventually decided by publication.
June 24, 2019 at 4:30 pm
[…] I’ll report more on new publications as they are published, but before that I thought I’d report on a couple of bits of news to do with Plan S, following the issuance last month of revised guidelines. […]