Hello all,

Please find below Petr Stepanek’s  message concerning the Plan S.

(https://notio.oulu.fi/fi/Lists/Tiedotteet/DispForm.aspx?ID=719 )

Best wishes

Päivi

Dear colleagues,

as you might be aware, a radical policy to change scientific publishing, the so-called Plan S (https://www.coalition-s.org/), has been recently proposed. Its aim is to make all publicly funded research immediately Open Access (OA), which is a noble goal, especially in the atmosphere of steadily increasing publishing costs. However, Plan S adopts a very narrow view to achieve this end, and is likely to make the situation even more costly and impose severe limitations at the same time. The restrictiveness of the current implementation raises significant concerns from researchers, perhaps the most impacted group as it prescribes and limits where we can publish our research articles - the main results upon which we and our work is constantly being evaluated.

In short, Plan S requires immediate OA on any article funded from Plan S signatory (in Finland that means - so far - Academy of Finland) in one of the three ways:

1. In fully OA journal (Gold OA)
2. By depositing it in a compliant repository (Green OA)
3. By publishing in hybrid journals which are under "transformation agreements"

In addition, the article must be published under open CC-BY license and with authors retaining the copyright.

Unfortunately, estimated 85% of all scientific journals do not comply with these rules. The ones that do, are in vast majority in the category 1 (Gold OA) and so in many cases carry with themselves significant fees for making the article publishable (APC). The category 2 is currently not a very viable option due to technical demands on Plan S-compliant repositories and limited compatibility with license and copyright options from publishers. Finally, there is no estimate on how viable is option 3 as Plan S has currently very low leverage on publishers because of its low pickup by funders. Indeed, even here at the University of Oulu, only 17% of all publications from 2018 are compatible* with requirements of Plan S, despite the fact that full 42% of them is in reality OA*. These numbers indicate how narrow is the view of OA as defined by Plan S.

However, there is an opportunity to influence Plan S. We can provide our feedback through the following channels

1. Direct contact to the creators of Plan S via https://www.coalition-s.org/feedback/ (open until February 8 17:00 CET)
2. Through Academy of Finland via viestinta@aka.fi
3. Via commenting on it and suggesting through https://wiki.oulu.fi/pages/viewpage.action?title=UniOulu+Plan+S+feedback&spaceKey=UPSF (open until January 28th). The comments will be taken into accounts in formulation of position on Plan S by the University of Oulu.

Plan S is backed by European Commission and ERC and is coming in some form. We should take this opportunity to influence it to help it achieve its goals in more liberal way, that will not threaten competitiveness and freedom of academic publishing and potentially set a dangerous precedent for future similarly restrictive policies.

Best Regards

Petr Stepanek

*Based on data evaluation from SOLECris according to the available Plan S guidelines

Petr Štěpánek, Ph.D.
NMR Research Unit
Faculty of Science, P.O. Box 3000
90014 University of Oulu
Finland
phone: +358 29 4481409
http://cc.oulu.fi/~nmrwww/
www.facebook.com/NMR.Oulu
http://www.nmrsymposium.fi/2019/