Hindawi has announced its support for the principles and ambitions of Plan S. Funders have collectively agreed to enforce Open Access with a default CC BY licence for academic articles arising from their grants sends a hugely powerful signal to researchers, publishers, institutions and other actors about the future of scholarly communication. Plan S represents a line in the sand. Funders are no longer prepared to accept a timeline for change that has largely been dictated by actors with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The potential disruption the plan causes to the industry has justifiably garnered worldwide attention and raised awareness – and opposition – not only among publishers and funders, but among researchers and their scholarly societies.
The cOAlition S aims to make all research outputs freely available to reuse and to ensure that those outputs are reliable. The coalition appreciates that there are three fundamental barriers to overcome: changing the existing subscription business model to one of Open Access; changing the current system by which researchers and other actors are ranked and evaluated; and providing the infrastructure and standards to support these changes. Plan S primarily focuses on the first barrier by embracing the APC model of Open Access and targeting hybrid journals in particular. There is no doubt that providing significantly more Open Access to the scholarly literature would be a huge achievement in and of itself.
Open Access, however, is the tip of the scholarly iceberg. And they want Plan S to be the catalyst for change it deserves to be – the catalyst for Open Science – which is after all just good science practiced in a way that takes advantage of the global reach and technology of the digital age. They therefore support the Coalition’s endeavours to obtain more global agreement on their plan – it cannot succeed without this. They also encourage the Coalition to take this opportunity to provide even closer alignment between the proposed timing of the flip to Open Access and the change to the way researchers are ranked and rewarded. Without coupling the change to Open Access with a parallel change in the evaluation of all research outputs, and the infrastructure to support such change, there is a risk they entrench the existing oligopoly of publishers within a cultural and financial system of scholarship that will continue to exclude the diversity, talent and innovation that science – in its broadest sense – requires to address the profound challenges facing society.
The Coalition can work with scholarly societies and other academic institutions to crack open the debate about the value of their non-publishing activities. If these are valued by the community, they should be supported. The beneficial activities of scholarly societies, however, should not be at the expense of access to and discoverability of research outputs. Scholarly societies have been and are a crucial part of the scholarly landscape – they need them to be part of the future. There is now an opportunity for them to reposition themselves in the digital landscape and help lead the discussion about what ‘quality’ in science/scholarship actually means. In collaboration with funders, they can act as a powerful mechanism for change.
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