KEY TAKEAWAYS

• cOAlition S announces a new proposal – ‘‘Towards Responsible Publishing’’ – to improve and speed up the dissemination of research findings.
• The initiative would give more power to authors to choose what they publish and when, including a wider range of scholarly outputs.

Following the implementation of Plan S, cOAlition S now looks set to drive open access publishing even further forwards, with a new proposal, “Towards Responsible Publishing”. The group aims to transform academic publishing into an “open, scholar-led communication ecosystem”.

In a recent blog post, Bodo Stern and Johan Rooryck (Executive Director of cOAlition S) outlined their view that key challenges persist within academic publishing, in particular:

• substantial lead times from article submission to publication of research
• inequitable access to publishing in some journals due to costs
• the pre-publication scientific discussion and critical feedback that form the basis of peer review are not made public.

cOAlition S is calling for a shift away from the current journal-led model of disseminating research findings to a system led by researchers, in which more outputs are made available and at a quicker pace.

To this end, ‘‘Towards Responsible Publishing’’ outlines 5 principles, built on 2 key concepts:

1. Authors should decide which research is published and when their work will be shared. Third-party organisations would only be able to offer their services in facilitation of peer review and publication, rather than selecting which research is shared and when.
2. Contributions throughout the research process should be shared to show progression over time and allow wider scrutiny. This includes early (pre-review) versions of articles and peer reviewer comments, not just final articles. The group argues this would end the role of the final journal-accepted article as the primary output of research.

cOAlition S believes this proposal will benefit the research community: “Our vision is a community-based scholarly communication system fit for open science in the 21^st [century], that empowers scholars to share the full range of their research outputs and to participate in new quality control mechanisms and evaluation standards for these outputs”. Now, the group calls for researchers and stakeholders to share their thoughts in a consultation process on the new proposal.

“Our vision is a community-based scholarly communication system fit for open science in the 21^st [century], that empowers scholars to share the full range of their research outputs and to participate in new quality control mechanisms and evaluation standards for these outputs”.

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