An international group of research financers, including the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw), operating under the name ‘cOAlition S’, wants scientists to publish exclusively in open access journals, the so-called Plan S. The idea behind the plan is that publicly funded research should be accessible to everyone free of charge. Authors pay journals once for publishing their article, making extravagantly expensive subscriptions to professional journals a thing of the past.

The original plan was to switch to completely open access as of January 1, 2020, but that proved to be far too soon. After extensive international consultation, it became clear that the parties involved needed more time to prepare for it. And they will get more time: the effective date has been moved to January 1, 2021.

Last February, the Executive Board of TU/e organized three dialogue sessions pertaining to Plan S during which the subject was explained and discussed. The second session held in Helix at the department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry made it especially apparent that the plan did not have many proponents. University professor René Janssen and dean Emiel Hensen categorically oppose the plan, and Janssen described Plan S as “a telling example of a plan that was thought up by people who have no experience with publishing in scientific journals” during that meeting. According to Janssen and Hensen, scientists themselves should be able to decide in which journals they wish to publish.

Green route

In addition to the one-year postponement, several other adjustments were made to Plan S as well. One such adjustment is that scientists will also be allowed to publish via the ‘green’ route in the future. This means that their publications will still be behind a journal’s paywall, but that they are accessible to everyone in a repository.

Marjet Elemans has a few reservations about the green route: “The ‘green’ route, which was suggested by cOAlition S, is subject to a few serious conditions that have quite an impact on publishers. Copyright for instance, which now usually lies with the publisher, has to stay with the original authors. And the publication also needs to be directly available. In the current ‘green’ route, it often takes between 12 to 24 months before a publication is accessible to everyone. I wonder whether publishers will move into that direction during the next year and a half.”

Hybrid

The international group of research financers remains critical when it comes to hybrid journals. These are journals that publish both paid publications and open access ones. That means they receive subscription fees and earn money by making new scientific publication accessible free of charge. The financers no longer wish to contribute to publications in these journals. However, they emphasize that they do want to pay towards the costs of open access publishing, so that the scientists will not end up having to pay for it.

Elemans says this about the matter: “It’s often possible to make open access publications compliant using the subsidy amount. The subsidizers do not want to pay for it any longer as long as journals also make money from subscription fees. They say that researchers should find the means themselves. Universities are strongly advised not to pay these means either, because that would only maintain the system.”

cOAlitieS will also revise its criteria in light of the so-called DORA declaration (the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment). It states that more attention must be paid to the quality and impact of research, and less to citation and publication scores of scientists. The declaration was signed by over twelve hundred organizations, including a science working group consisting of the NWO, ZonMw and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Elemans believes postponing the implementation by a year is a wise decision in any case. “Only now does everyone know exactly which requirements they have to meet, and it gives researchers and institutions time to make decisions based on that.”