Plan S 2.0 open access plan ‘bold, but may prove ineffective’

New proposals to transform academic publishing put forward by the Coalition S coalition of research funders are bold but might ultimately prove ineffective, according to observers.

Under the original plan for what was known as Plan S, which was launched in January 2021, all papers that were supported by participating European funders had to be made freely available to read at the point of publication.

While the initiative has had a significant impact, signing up 21 national funders globally, some open-access advocates have been frustrated by its failure to significantly erode the dominant position of big academic publishers within research and the high article-processing charges levied by some prestigious journals in lieu of subscription fees.

In a new set of proposals, Coalition S says it should be authors, not publishers, who decide when and what to publish – on the understanding that outputs should be shared immediately and openly, at no cost to researchers.

Under this model, academics would be free to use publishers if they wanted to, for services such as editing and peer review, but would not be obliged to.

The ideas bear some similarity to proposals considered earlier this year by the European Council, which foresaw a switch from publishing in journals to state-backed platforms such as the European Union’s own Open Research Europe.

Johan Rooryck, the executive director of Coalition S, said that the new proposals were “a positive step forward in promoting accessibility and equity within scholarly communication”.

Robert-Jan Smits, one of the architects of Plan S while he was director general of research and innovation at the European Commission, said the tougher line was the result of the fact that large commercial publishers had not “pulled their weight” in the shift towards open access.

“They want to get things done and are fed up with the delays,” he said of the funders’ perspective. “The large commercial publishers can only blame it on themselves that there is now a Plan S 2.0.”

Mr Smits, now president of Eindhoven University of Technology, said the “bold” proposals would hand more power to researchers and relegate publishers to being “mere service providers”.

But Rick Anderson, university librarian at Utah’s Brigham Young University-Provo, who has researched the business models of scholarly publishers, questioned whether the plan would have the desired impact.

He said that Coalition S had yet to convince the global research ecosystem to adopt its vision and seemed outraged by this, adding that the group’s slow growth in recent years suggested that anything close to global adoption remained unlikely.

“In fact, I think the current proposal will likely do more to discourage new countries and funders from signing on than it will to encourage them,” Mr Anderson said.

“Boldness isn’t enough to make a plan successful, and I think Coalition S is confusing a radical vision with an effective one.”

Reorienting publishing around the needs of researchers sounded good to Samuel Moore, the scholarly communication specialist at Cambridge University Libraries, but he said much would come down to implementation details and the financial support on offer.

Plan S was imposed on researchers, so the consultation on these plans had to be “more than just lip service”, but also should not bow down to the conservatism of academic societies and commercial publishers, he said.

“Devising new ways of assessing people and research is often akin to simply shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic,” he added.

“Publishing won’t radically change until the brutally competitive nature of academia changes too – and this is a political issue that funders should really be throwing their weight and resources behind.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com