Plan S, the effort by European funders to increase the share of journal articles that can be read without a subscription, has had an unintended outcome, a report released today says. It has spurred progress toward open access, but most of the growth has occurred in so-called hybrid journals that also publish other articles behind paywalls, despite hopes that Plan S would help tear down those walls.
In 2018, Plan S backers proposed a novel set of rules aimed at expanding open access that took effect in January 2021. Proponents hoped progress would be swift. But the report, from an independent consultant, says Plan S needs more time to take hold. It could take 5 to 10 more years to obtain solid evidence showing whether its policies are helping accomplish the funders’ goals to make the large majority of scientific articles immediately free to read when published.
The slow headway is “unfortunate,” but “it’s not in our remit to tell the publishers what to do,” says Johan Rooryck, a linguist at Leiden University and executive director of Coalition S, the group of 28 national and philanthropic research funders, mostly based in Europe, that hatched Plan S. Still, Coalition S is “encouraged” by the report, he says, which highlights “the impact that we’ve had.” Early next year, he notes, the coalition hopes to finalize a revised plan for promoting open access.
Coalition S requested the independent checkup, which was produced by Scidecode Science Consulting, a firm in Berlin that analyzes the publishing industry. It finds that Plan S has been “the most successful attempt by a group of research funders to work together to address the pressing issues in research publishing.” In particular, write Scidecode’s Pablo de Castro and his colleagues, the effort has advanced discussions “by clearly stating what is wrong and how the issues could perhaps be fixed.” Coalition S and other critics have faulted requiring authors and institutions to pay for publishing articles open access, calling the practice financially unsustainable and unfair.
About 50% of all newly published scientific literature is now open access in some form. To test how much of this was catalyzed by Plan S (the “S” stands for “shock”), Scidecode compared papers by a subset of Coalition S grantees with papers by researchers lacking such a mandate. The analysis found little evidence that Plan S has made a significant difference.
Among the journal articles published by grantees of Poland’s National Science Center, for example, the open-access percentage rose from 87% before Plan S was implemented to 93% after—but this gain lagged that of the comparison group. (Scidecode notes that because the percentage of Poland’s papers that were open access before Plan S was already unusually high, there was little room for growth.)
The open-access percentage among Coalition S–backed papers did increase by more than the ones not subject to an open-access mandate in one subcategory of articles—those published in hybrid journals, which disseminate a mix of open-access and paywalled articles. Scidecode says that finding also reflects the growth since 2021 of “transformative agreements,” contracts between publishers and institutions or library consortia that typically cover both access to paywalled content as well as the fees to make the institutions’ authors’ papers open access. (Those are costs that authors otherwise pay out of their grants or their own pockets.) Such agreements can cover both hybrid and “gold” journals, which publish only open-access articles.
Although transformative agreements tend to reduce administrative headaches for authors, they have helped increase the market share of the largest commercial scientific publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature. Those publishers often offer large collections of journals and have large staffs to negotiate such agreements with numerous institutions—putting smaller commercial and nonprofit publishers at a competitive disadvantage. What’s more, deals for transformative agreements have tended to involve well-financed institutions in developed countries that can afford them; they are rare in less developed nations, raising questions about equity. Some institutions have paid more for such deals than they previously did for subscriptions.
Some critics of Plan S had predicted such trade-offs when it was first proposed. As a transitional measure, funders in Coalition S initially paid for open-access fees in select hybrid journals on condition that their publishers pledge to increase the open-access percentage in those journals at a prescribed rate. But last year, the coalition decided to phase out that provision effective 31 December 2024, because it decided the percentage in most of these journals was not increasing fast enough. The move doesn’t prohibit Coalition S grantees from continuing to publish papers open access through transformative agreements funded by their institutions. (Authors can also comply with Plan S by paying author fees to publish in “gold” open-access journals or by depositing “green open access” articles in public repositories.)
Although the numbers don’t show that Plan S has expanded open-access publishing significantly, the consultants say their interviews with university librarians and managers suggest it is having an impact. Some told Scidecode that Plan S helped elevate open access as a priority for senior administrators and ease contract negotiations with publishers.
Plan S deserves a share of credit for creating a “norm in many disciplines to publish through open-access models,” especially in Europe, said Emma Wilson, publishing director at the Royal Society of Chemistry, at a forum in April at which Scidecode’s draft findings were discussed. Her society, which is working to expand its open-access publishing options, “believes this will continue, and there will be a tipping point that will enable us to make a sustainable transition from a mixed-model publisher to a [solely] open-access one.”
Rooryck says the upcoming revisions to Coalition S’s policies will likely continue existing Plan S mandates for papers. But it might supplement those requirements with incentives and assistance for researchers to make many other products of their scholarly activities, such as peer-review reports they write, publicly accessible. Coalition members may also step up efforts to help develop “diamond” open-access journals that do not charge subscriptions or open-access publication fees. “We believe that the carrot is more important than the stick,” Rooryck says.
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/mixed-review-plan-s-s-drive-make-papers-open-access
