A new initiative aimed at greatly accelerating the migration to a fully Open Access research environment in Europe was recently announced: Plan S. Backed by 11 national funding organisations joined together in the guise of cOAlition S, and with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council, the Plan aims to see all research funded by participating funding organisations being published via OA compliant journals or platforms by 2020.
SPARC Europe supports cOAlition S and Plan S, and is working on ways to aid their success.
The foundational document, Plan S, was jointly developed by Science Europe, a group of heads of national research funding organisations, and Robert-Jan Smits, Senior Advisor on Open Access within the European Political Strategy Centre at the European Commission (EC) with input from the European Research Council. The Plan is defined by 'one target and 10 principles'; with the core target centring on the goal of making all research being funded by coalition members, fully Open by 2020, and the 10 principles drilling into some of the specifics of the mandate - from author rights to publication fees to the role of open archives and repositories.
Specifically, the intent of Plan S is to accelerate efforts aimed at modernising the way research is both published and paid for. At the same time, the Plan recognises the importance of supportive infrastructure while also encouraging Open Access policy alignment to strengthen regional, national and international-level efforts to advance OA.
This move by funders is a recognition of their responsibility to not only fund the research itself, but to also ensure that it has the greatest possible impact; this involves a duty of care to the academic research system as a whole – and encompasses the details of research dissemination as well as the need to ensure the smart and fair use of public funds. A likely result among researchers will be a higher degree of engagement on issues including where they publish and why they are locking their work behind paywalls.
While at present, 11 national funding organisations from across Europe have signed on to cOAlition S; the expectation is that this number will continue to grow.
The plan and its preamble specifically mentions using the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) as a starting point to discover how research may be assessed in new and different ways.
While SPARC Europe thoroughly welcomes this new mandate by funders, a number of challenges remain if they are to see the 2020 goal met, primarily the multiple, varied details related to implementation. However, these are challenges many in the community, including SPARC Europe, are already committing to meet.
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