Tag: Plan S

Plan S

25th June 2021

Plan S is an international and collaborative initiative that aims to to achieve full and immediate open access, based around a series of principles.

“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.”

UKRI were an early signatory of plan S, meaning that all successful grant award winners from the UK’s seven research councils, along with many others funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are subject the requirements of plan S.

Sample of funders that are signatories of plan S
*A component of UKRI (formerly RCUK) which as signed at the top level

A major change for plan S from UKRI or REF 2021’s open access policies is around hybrid publication. Unequivocally, plan S does “not support the ‘hybrid’ model of publishing. However, as a transitional pathway towards full Open Access within a clearly defined timeframe, and only as part of transformative arrangements,” This is significant as some major publishers, including Elsevier, have still not agreed a Transformative Agreement, rendering their non-Gold open access titles as non-compliant with plan S. The Journal Checker Tool can be used to ascertain a titles compliance status with plan S.

Plan S does support the Green route to open access, however, it requires a CC BY licence and zero embargo, which is where the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) comes in. The RRS is handled by a pre-existing legal requirement from the funder to the grantee that supersedes any requirements between the author and the publisher (although it could lead to a breach of contract with the publisher depending on the requirements and actions.)

A table showing the current Transformative Agreements with some of the largest scholarly publishers and their current embargo policies

We encourage all researchers to familiarise themselves with plan S. We would also strongly advise all grant holders looking to publish articles to consult with the Scholarly Communications Manager prior to submitting any articles for publication to ensure that the requirements of plan S are met.

Golden opportunities? Emerging opportunities to expand access to Gold open access (OA) publishing

3rd July 2020

The evolution of the OA policy landscape is showing no signs of rest. With the implementation of plan S just months away, many of the legacy academic and scholarly publishers are busy amending their agreements with universities to ensure that they are compliant with plan S. Since UKRI- including all of the UK’s Research Councils- and others funders such as the Wellcome Trust are signatories of plan S, there is a clear intention for integral stakeholders to progress the existing OA landscape that has already been heavily shaped by existing policies.

What does this mean? 

The plan S principles intend to bring about “make full and immediate open access a reality.” Whilst the Green route to open access is explicitly supported, much of the orientation of the initiative is framed around traditional publication through journals, and in particular through the Gold route. 

Various business models support Gold OA publication. The APC (article processing charge) model has been the most widely implemented model by many of the legacy publishers. This means that the funding of Gold open access publication often relies on a payment on a per-article basis.

However, as universities traditionally pay subscriptions to publishers for access to scholarly materials, such monies have not been relieved from existing costs in the scholarly communication workflows. Indeed, universities may well have an increased total cost by the inclusion of APCs due to the simultaneous payments for access and publication within the same hybrid title, a phenomenon often referred to as ‘double dipping’. 

For funded research, access to funds to cover APCs is often provided in order to meet their stated mandates around Gold OA publication. However, for research that is not produced as a result of grants from specific funders may feel have more limited access to publish via the Gold method in journals of their interest due to a lack of funding to cover high APC costs. 

Changing practices 

As such, plan S requires some publishers to amend their operations and the deals that they offer to universities. The University has started to take advantage of some of these ‘transformative agreements’ that cover both the traditional access aspect of the publisher’s offering, but also a Gold OA publishing aspect. Such transformative deals were already offered by publishers such as Springer, and the University maintain their read and publish deal.

The University has recently signed Wiley’s read and publish deal, meaning that we can support our researchers to publish via Gold OA with Wiley without incurring APCs (please follow the links for further details on some of the limitations of the deal.) This means that works published through these deals are freely available to all immediately upon publication without barriers to access via the internet. The works are published under Creative Commons licenses (which we will generally recommend a preference for CC BY 4.0 in order to maximise reuse value and optimise the potential for increasing impact, but we will have a new blog post on this for you very soon!)  

The University is currently addressing other appropriate read and publish deals that are emerging in order to offer greater value to our communities of researchers. Sage are currently offering such a deal and this is being appraised by colleagues with experience in both the library and within Research Development Services (GRE). 

A mixed landscape 

The funding of OA publication is still a very diverse landscape. Many creative and experimental operations that are aiming to find stable revenue streams that are more equitable. For instance, the Open Library of Humanities are a pure Gold OA publisher, and they have never been funded through APCs. Instead, they offer the opportunity for universities to participate in a low-cost ‘partnership scheme’. This has provided stability, and allowed great value for money to be offered. 

Gold open access publishing in other areas, however, is still a major challenge for many. The evolution of electronic books has been far more stymied than that of the electric journal or journal articles. Proprietary formats, access credit models, and digital rights management (DRM) are just some of the many differences. Scaling monograph and book publishing to Gold open access has, as such, been incredibly slow.  

The Open Book Publishers and punctum books are two open access book publishers that offer viable OA publishing a in this area, and the initiatives such as the COPIM project aim to investigate how this area may be developed to broaden and deepen the open landscape for scholarly publication. 

Stability in unstable times? 

The landscape for Gold OA is still nascent, and there are many reasonable critiques of of the emerging policies and commercial offerings from some publishers, along with the political context in which the shift towards open access publication is occurring within. 

The complexities surrounding all of this can seem alienating and even frustrating for researchers that simply want to share their work with various communities. We want support your scholarly communication activities, and as such, we are always available to ask about anything and help take some of the administrative load that the contemporary scenario may yield.    

Open Access Week 2019 – Friday – Where do we go from here?

25th October 2019
Crystal ball with Open Access logo
Image created by A.Carter

At this point we have looked at the beginnings of open access, what it means now and the various reactions surrounding it, but now we will look at what we can expect for the immediate future.

We can see that open access is not going away anytime soon and is in fact growing. Examples include the REF 2021 and Plan S. In addition, we have seen an increase in open access deals such as the recent one between Springer and 700 German universities. Though these deals are controversial as they do not translate to complete open access, they are nonetheless a stepping point towards it. Open access also does face problems despite its growth, such as a recent article from Science Magazine highlighting that open access megajournals are in fact declining in performance.

REF2021

Most of those who have been following us up to this point are probably very familiar with the REF 2021. As part of the rules governing REF 2021, submissions must follow, at minimum, the green open access route. The gold open access route is also an option and is sometimes preferred, due to the embargo restrictions normally placed in green open access. For guidance on how to deposit your academic outputs to the Greenwich Academic Literature Archive we have tutorials available. It is important to note that if you plan on going through the green open access route, that you are aware of any embargoes and of the deadlines REF 2021 imposes. These deadlines include that you must deposit an article or conference proceeding item no later than three months after the date acceptance. After the item has been deposited it must meet the open access requirements. If there is no embargo then the output must be available within one month of deposit, conversely if there is an embargo then it must be available within one month after it expires. If you decide to follow the gold route these do not apply to your output.

The UK isn’t the only country to have a REF. In fact, other countries have their own versions, such as Australia and their Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA).

Plan S

Our next point of notice is Plan S. This is a funder driven movement to make it compulsory for publicly funded scientific research to be published in purely open access journals from 2021 onwards. A more detailed description of Plan S can be found one of our previous blog posts: Plan S – Accelerating the transition to full and immediate Open Access.

In addition to open access there are also similar movements, believing in similar principles for different fields. Such examples include:

  • Open Data. The belief that all data should be openly available and can be reused.
  • Open source software. The movement that believes that software code should be openly available, reused and modified by everyone.
  • Open science. The general umbrella movement that includes both of the previous movements, but also includes others that share the same goal of making research open and transparent.

From all of this we can see there is more than just open access. That the principles are not restricted to this one particular movement, and that there are others that share them as well. If you have reached this far and you would like to get a more in depth understanding about the history of open access, then you can find more details at Ars Technica.

Plan S – Accelerating the transition to full and immediate Open Access

31st July 2019

What is Plan S, what is the point?

Plan S is a set of principles designed by a group called cOAlition S that support and promote the benefits of Open Access and aim to facilitate full and immediate Open Access for funded research as soon as possible. They put the responsibility primarily on Publishers and Funders to change behaviours that have so far limited the take up of Open Access.  

Who is behind this?

cOAlition S is a group of national research funding organisations, led by Science Europe, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council.

Represented by UKRI for the UK, a wide range of other countries national funders have also joined: Austria, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, Jordan, Zambia. International funders Wellcome Trust, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have also joined and show their full support.

What does it involve?

From 1 January 2021 the Principles of Plan S will come into force. In short, if your work is funded by a call that is published after 1 January 2021, any publications must be published in an Open Access venue or made openly and immediately available in an Open Access repository (like GALA) with no embargo.

Plan S provide 10 principles which can be found on their website.

But they basically break down to the following:

Your Funders:

  • Funders will lead the development of the criteria that Open Access journals, platforms and repositories must follow. This includes providing incentives to establish and support the development of new journals and platforms where there is a need.
  • This support also extends to Open Access publication fees (when required), which should also be covered by the Funders where possible.
  • Funders will support a diversity of business models for publishing Open Access, but they must also ensure that any APCs are value for money.
  • Funders will not support ‘hybrid’ model journals who charge both APCs and subscriptions for the same content. However, they may support journals that are in transition away from ‘hybrid’ to another model if there is a fixed deadline for the change.
  • Funders will monitor and sanction non-compliance.
  • Funders will make a commitment to responsible metrics, and no longer use anything other than the intrinsic merit of the work itself to assess supporting outputs in bids, stopping all use of Impact Factor (IF) or the knowledge of who published a paper.

Your Publishers/Journals:

  • Authors must be able to retain copyright of their publications and use CC-BY licenses to enable reuse.
  • All authors should be able to publish their work Open Access – there must be a variety of options available, individual researchers should not have to pay their own APCs

Other

  • Funders, Publishers, universities, libraries… all should be working together to align policies and make processes transparent.
  • The principles apply to everything, but cOAlition S acknowledge that putting processes in place for books and monographs will take significantly longer and as such the January 2021 deadline does not apply. A separate document will be provided in 2021.

How will this affect me? What do I need to do?

For now, you need to watch this space! As the funders and publishers make changes and updates to their policies and processes in the lead up to 2021, there will be more information available about which journals will comply with Plan S and in which way.

As it stands, for research funded by calls after January 2021, your outputs will need to be Open Access, either in an Open Access Journal, by paying an APC, or being put in the repository with no embargo.