A guide to Plan S: the open-access initiative shaking up science publishing

In 2018, an influential group of analysis funders introduced a daring pledge: the scientists they fund ought to publish their peer-reviewed papers exterior journal paywalls. The initiative, referred to as Plan S, induced an immediate uproar over its goal of ending journal subscription fashions — the means by which many scholarly publications have financed their existence. Its meant begin date in 2020 was delayed, and its particulars had been tweaked. But after a lot sparring over coverage, the mission formally started in 2021, with 25 funding businesses rolling out comparable open-access (OA) mandates.

As the first papers underneath these mandates are printed, Plan S supporters say it’s the begin of a journey in direction of open science. But most analysis funders haven’t signed up but, and negotiations over the plan have produced a posh panorama of choices to keep away from paywalls. Here’s what the initiative means for scientists and journals — and a few of the controversies that can play out in 2021 and past.

What do Plan S funders inform scientists to do?

Support for Plan S comes from cOAlition S — a gaggle of analysis funders that features a host of primarily European nationwide funding businesses, and a few of the world’s most influential personal biomedical funders, akin to the US organizations the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the London-based funder Wellcome. These funders had been acknowledged on round 200,000 science papers printed final yr — round 5% of all analysis articles, however 12% of a choice of the most highly-cited journals, in accordance to an evaluation by citation-analytics agency Clarivate and DeltaThink, a consultancy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Scientists with grants from these funders should make ensuing papers instantly free to learn and publish them underneath a liberal license in order that anybody can obtain, reuse or republish the paper. Researchers can publish their ultimate paper OA in a journal, or they’ll make the accepted, peer-reviewed model of their manuscript accessible on-line in an authorized repository. cOAlition S has rolled out a ‘Journal Checker Tool’ that guarantees to let researchers see their compliant publishing choices for any journal.

One wrinkle is that every funder differs on the way it will apply its coverage. Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation apply their OA insurance policies to all manuscripts submitted for publication after 1 January 2021. But others, akin to nationwide funders in Norway, Finland and the Netherlands, apply it to papers that outcome from requires analysis proposals issued in 2021. The United Kingdom’s nationwide funder, UK Research and Innovation, hasn’t but stated when its new coverage begins: it’s ready for a evaluation later this yr.

Money is a key bone of rivalry. Many journals cost per-paper charges to publish OA. Most Plan S funders will cowl these charges, however not in all circumstances. The European Commission, as an example (which helps Plan S), pays charges for absolutely OA journals, however received’t pay in the case of hybrid journals, that are subscription journals that provide OA publishing. Other funders will help paying for OA in just some sorts of hybrid journals, and can evaluation this coverage in 2024.

How have publishers reacted?

Subscription journals have largely tailored in order that Plan S-affected scientists can nonetheless publish with them. The greatest disruption was at extremely selective journals, which reject most of the papers submitted to them, and recoup their prices by subscription charges. They argued that in the event that they switched to an OA mannequin, they’d have to cost extraordinarily excessive charges for the few papers that they publish.

In the finish, these extremely selective titles adjusted. They all retained their subscription fashions, however some introduced new OA-publishing choices, with per-paper charges amongst the highest in the business: Nature’s OA fee is €9,500 (US$11,500), whereas Cell’s is €8,500, as an example. Other journals, such as Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, will permit Plan S-funded scientists — however not others — to submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts on-line with liberal licensing phrases whereas ultimate variations of papers stay behind paywalls. This avoids excessive charges, nevertheless it’s not clear whether or not the journals can proceed to run this fashion if numerous funders be a part of Plan S.

Next yr, funders may place limits on how a lot they are going to pay. cOAlition S says that after July 2022, solely publishers who’ve offered knowledge to clarify their OA charges underneath one among two ‘price and service transparency frameworks’ can be eligible for his or her help, and that cOAlition S will help solely OA publication charges which are “fair and reasonable”.

Can’t scientists simply make their papers freely accessible on-line?

That is the focus of one among Plan S’s most contentious elements, introduced in July 2020. Under the ‘rights retention strategy’ (RRS), Plan S funders have instructed authors — as a authorized situation of their grants — to assert that they keep the proper to submit their peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript on-line, with a liberal publishing license, once they submit their manuscript to a journal.

By doing this, a scientist may publish behind a paywall however adjust to their funder’s mandate by instantly posting their accepted manuscript OA on-line. (Posting a preprint doesn’t adjust to Plan S.) Some researchers have already begun utilizing RRS language of their journal submissions — and the technique may permit scientists to keep away from OA publishing charges, though cOAlition S says that publishing the ultimate paper OA is its ‘preferred’ route.

Many journals require delays earlier than accepted manuscripts are posted on-line or require that these manuscripts are shared underneath a restricted license. But cOAlition S says the RRS trumps these phrases and that the solely means journals can forestall it’s to flip away papers from scientists who invoke it.

More than 50 publishers, together with Elsevier, Wiley and Springer Nature, signed a press release in February saying that they don’t help the rights-retention route to compliance. When requested whether or not they would mechanically reject manuscripts whose authors used the RRS, Elsevier referred Nature’s reporters to the February assertion; Wiley and Springer Nature each stated they might not, however that, if a manuscript handed peer evaluation, they might direct authors in direction of selecting to publish their ultimate paper OA. A Springer Nature spokesperson added that authors ought to ask their funders to cowl OA prices, and that finally, the agency may select to low cost or waive a per-paper OA price at its discretion. (Nature is editorially unbiased of its writer).

In a blog post printed on 8 April, Springer Nature says that if a Plan S writer desires to publish behind a paywall with out paying a per article cost, they are going to be required to signal a license that solely permits their manuscript to be shared after an embargo interval. This successfully overwrites the RRS.

How does Plan S have an effect on the open-access motion?

Despite the complexity it’s introduced, Plan S has already catalysed a shift in the OA panorama, advocates say. Journals that beforehand provided no route to make peer-reviewed articles instantly OA now do — even when just for authors with Plan S funders — and there’s been a blossoming of experiments with OA enterprise fashions. All it is a precursor to arriving at open science, says Colleen Campbell, a coordinator at OA2020, an alliance campaigning to change subscription enterprise fashions with OA publishing. “The culture is changing,” says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Plan S can also be shedding mild on the funds of journals, as subscription-funded publications begin to cost per-paper charges. Robert Kiley, the coordinator of Plan S and Wellcome’s head of open analysis, desires to proceed making writer pricing extra clear. “We want to get to a place where publishers can fully articulate the services they provide, and the prices they charge,” he says.

These are long-standing questions for a lot of funders and researchers, who level out that enormous science-publishing corporations make sizeable income whereas counting on researchers to freely present manuscripts and evaluation one another’s work. Publishers, in return, argue that their work provides worth to scientific articles.

The pay-per-paper enterprise mannequin has disadvantages. It dangers excluding researchers who’re much less rich or aren’t backed by funders or establishments that can choose up the tab. Some journals are trialling enterprise fashions that keep away from instantly charging authors per paper. Many hybrid journals have struck ‘transformative agreements’: contracts by which college consortia or libraries pay lump sums that each permit their scientists to publish work overtly and canopy subscriptions to paywalled content material. In one other concept, referred to as ‘subscribe to open’, subscription journals every year supply to open up that yr’s journal content material if all their subscribers agree to proceed paying charges.

Some OA journals, too, are turning away from per-paper charges: PLOS, the non-profit publishing group, now gives a ‘community action publishing’ plan by which universities pay flat annual charges that allow their scientists to publish freely in PLOS’s most-selective journals. The writer will cap surplus income at 10% above prices. In March, Plan S released a study of the funds of non-commercial journals that cost neither publishing nor subscription charges however are sponsored in different methods, as an example by governments or philanthropies.

Plan S may additionally assist to shift the management-by-metrics tradition of contemporary science. Funders signing up to it have avowed that, once they make grant choices, they’ll worth the “intrinsic merit” of papers that researchers publish — not the place the papers are printed or any metric-based journal evaluation. It’s not clear how this can be monitored or enforced, nonetheless.

Ultimately, the influence of the plan may hinge on whether or not the majority of the world’s science funders — together with these in the United States, China and India — signal up to its imaginative and prescient.