KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Plan S architects cOAlition S have released the results of a global consultation on their latest open access proposal, “Towards Responsible Publishing”.
• Broad support exists for preprint posting, permissive licensing, and open peer review, while challenges remain around incentives, infrastructure, and implementation.

Earlier this year, cOAlition S welcomed the findings of a consultation with global stakeholders on their “Towards Responsible Publishing” (TRP) proposal. A detailed report reveals broad support for aspects such as preprint posting, the use of permissive licences, and open peer review, yet challenges remain.  

The proposal

Originally published last year, TRP builds on the principles of Plan S, which calls for the academic community to move towards “full and immediate” open access. cOAlition S proposes to reform academic publishing away from “highly inequitable” funding models, such as subscription charges and (over time) article processing charges (APCs), towards a scholar-led publishing ecosystem. These principles are aimed at allowing authors to decide when and what to publish.

The consultation

Over 11,600 respondents contributed to the consultation, including:

• 440 responses to an initial stakeholder feedback survey
• 72 focus group participants
• 11,145 responses to an online global researcher survey.

The report acknowledges that low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) were underrepresented in the initial stakeholder feedback survey data. To mitigate this, the report authors solicited 10 organisational feedback letters from LMICs.

Key findings

There was general support across regions and academic disciplines for:

• preprint posting, to increase research transparency
• permissive licensing, albeit with some concerns that open licence adoption is imposed by funders rather than the academic community
• open peer review (where reports are published alongside a published article), with a preference for reviewer anonymity.

Despite this support, the traditional journal ecosystem remains dominant, with researchers reliant on journal indexes and impact factors when deciding where to publish. The report suggests that researchers in LMICs may be more dependent on these metrics currently. Along with inequities in relation to APCs, this could lead to TRP being seen as an imposition by wealthier nations.

There was general support across regions and academic disciplines for preprint posting, permissive licensing, and open peer review.

The way forward

The report suggests that cOAlition S should pursue a phased approach to implementing TRP goals:

• Short term: encourage preprint posting and open licensing
• Medium term: promote open peer review
• Long term: reform incentives at a global scale to encourage open access publishing, and reallocate resources from legacy funding models towards scholar-led publishing infrastructure

cOAlition S aim to publish a full response to the findings by the end of 2024.

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KEY TAKEAWAY

• Five years after its launch, Robert-Jan Smits calls on the scientific community to remain committed to Plan S.

In an opinion piece for Research Professional News, Robert-Jan Smits emphasises the importance of adhering to Plan S, the revolutionary initiative launched in 2018 by cOAlition S to ensure that publications resulting from publicly funded research are immediately available for all to read. He highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic saw a significant rise in open access publishing, fostering hope that this ‘new normal’ could be sustained. However, despite these initial gains, the journey towards full open access remains slow.

Despite initial gains, the journey towards full open access remains slow.

Key achievements:

• cOAlition S has grown to include 25 organisations, including the World Health Organization.
• The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy adopted an open access policy closely aligned with Plan S principles.
• Transformative agreements between academic institutions and publishers were conceived to speed up commitment to immediate open access.

Despite these successes, significant challenges persist:

• 61% of scientific papers published each year remain behind paywalls.
• Persistent myths equate open access with low-quality, predatory journals.
• Academic libraries struggle with the shift from ‘pay to read’ to ‘pay to publish’.
• Article processing charges (APCs) are often prohibitive.
• Some journals have been too slow in transitioning to open access.

Smits argues for a hard 2024 deadline for transformative agreements to deliver results. He suggests capping APCs to control costs and advocates for transparency in publishing expenses.

Ultimately, Smits is concerned that the course may be changing and fears that initiatives such as diamond open access and not-for-profit open access publishing platforms will not facilitate the significant shifts needed to make full open access a reality.

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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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