Researchers’ first reactions to Plan S updates

Key talking points in the discussion included:

• Researchers are still concerned about limitations on the journals they can publish in – both in terms of how they’ll ensure they can continue to reach the right audience and how this might impact on early career researchers’ career progress, as journal impact factors unfortunately still count in researcher evaluation processes across the world. cOAlition S’s commitment to changing the way researchers are evaluated is welcome, and everyone agrees that researchers should be judged on the quality of their work and not the journal they publish in. However this is not the current situation and it’s not going to change overnight.
• Science is global, but Plan S is not. There have been positive developments in countries expressing support for the principles of Plan S and aligning substantially with its open access commitments. However, many countries still have not fully signed up (eg the USA) – and so if you are in an international collaboration and not all parties are funded by a Plan S funder, issues may arise around where work can be published. Also, the prospects of early career researchers seeking work in countries who are not familiar with Plan S may be harmed if potential employers are looking for journal prestige.
• Is Plan S in fact ‘rushed’? The conversation around moving to open access has been going on for decades, not months, so it’s unfair to say the move to open access is being rushed. It is also very positive that cOAlition S has extended the timeline to 2021, and transitional arrangements will be helpful. Even so, existing perceptions around journal prestige and researcher evaluation will take time to change. What will happen to researchers caught in the middle?
• Science should not be controlled or driven by profits, and it is wrong that commercial publishers make huge profits by subscription-based models that lock in institutional customers to fund sub-par journals in order to access quality journals. While not all publishers are ‘the enemy’ – recognising in particular the value of how learned societies direct their publishing surplus – we should be aiming for a future in which there are no fees for readers or authors. Publishers should ideally be funded directly by research-funding bodies, as forcing publishers to rely on article processing charges could harm journal quality.

Building on researchers' feedback 

In seeking compromise, participants suggested three points to move forward:

1. put the onus on publishers to seriously consider switching their journals to non-article processing charge models of open access, particularly Green open access;
2. seek more clarity from cOAlition S on specifically how they will address problems arising from the fact that the initiative is not yet global, and encourage cOAlition S to continue pushing for more countries to sign up; and
3. use the extended timeframe to spread the word about Plan S among more researchers, as there are still very many researchers who are unaware of the changes, and they need to be given time to feed in their views and prepare.

As the biggest open access publisher in the chemical sciences, the Royal Society of Chemistry recognises the benefits of open access: it allows wider knowledge dissemination, removes reading restrictions in its gold form, and offers more opportunities for researchers to improve the visibility of their work and build a strong reputation. We are working to make sure that the transition to open publishing is smooth, fair and sustainable, with no compromise to quality, or to editorial and ethical standards.

We publish the largest fully open access journal in the chemical sciences, RSC Advances, and our flagship high impact journal, Chemical Science, is both free to read and free to publish in (we support these costs). We’ve also led the way for chemistry by developing and agreeing forward-thinking Read and Publish deals in 10 countries, with major institutions like Max Planck. You can read more about all these initiatives on our open access pages.

Responding to the recent changes to Plan S, our Director of Publishing, Dr Emma Wilson, said: "We’re pleased that cOAlition S have taken a broad range of stakeholders’ feedback into account in revising their Plan S guidelines – but there’s more work to do to incorporate the views of researchers.

"cOAlition S’s explicit recognition of the role of learned societies in scholarly communications is welcome and we echo the view that learned and professional societies are partners in this transition.

"We welcome cOAlitions S’s recognition of concerns voiced by researchers but more direct action is needed to mitigate them – including the unintended consequences of an uncoordinated global roll-out, and the potential cost implications for unfunded researchers.

"We will continue to engage with our community, and support a smooth, fair and sustainable transition to open access publishing that does not considerably add to the workload of researchers or impact on their career progression."