Science: To meet the ‘Plan S’ open-access mandate, journals mull setting papers free at publication

19 May, 2019

Interesting article in Science (with thanks to a tweet from Jeremy Farrar, Wellcome Trust). Extracts below. Full text here: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/meet-plan-s-open-access-mandate-...

'Plan S, the funder-backed scheme to require free online access to scientific literature, aims to shake up the subscription journals that have long dominated scholarly publishing. Now, some publishers are considering an approach they hope will both comply with the plan and maintain their subscription income: allowing authors to post manuscripts in public archives as soon as their papers are published...'

'Many [publishers] have warmed to another compliance option: "green" open access. In that model — permitted in the draft version of Plan S, unveiled in September 2018 — Plan S–funded authors could deposit free-to-read papers in public repositories without a waiting period.

'The journal would continue to collect subscription fees, and the mechanism could benefit some authors who lack funding to pay for gold open access...'

All readers would have free access to the author-accepted manuscript. This 'contains changes in response to peer review but lacks features of the published version such as a designed layout, hyperlinks to referenced articles, and supplementary materials'.

Best wishes, Neil

Coordinator, HIFA Project on Access to Health Research

http://www.hifa.org/working-groups/access-health-research

Let's build a future where people are no longer dying for lack of healthcare information - Join HIFA: www.hifa.org

HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of the HIFA global health campaign (Healthcare Information For All - www.hifa.org ), a global community with more than 19,000 members in 177 countries, interacting on six global forums in four languages. Twitter: @hifa_org FB: facebook.com/HIFAdotORG neil@hifa.org