Croatian Medical Journal | 2021
The impact of Plan S on scholarly journals from less developed European countries
Abstract
In September 2018, Science Europe (https://www.scienceeurope.org/) launched the cOalition S initiative for increasing open access (OA) to research data and publications derived from publicly funded research projects. The backbone of the initiative is Plan S, with one main goal: “With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo” (1). Whichever of these three routes is taken, “all publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY), in order to fulfill the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration.” Plan S defines OA platforms as publishing outlets for original research publications (such as Wellcome Open Research or Open Research Europe, which will soon be launched by the European Commission), and not those that are serving to aggregate or re-publish content already being published elsewhere. It recognizes the importance of the green route to OA and strongly encourages the deposition of all publications in a repository, irrespective of the chosen route. Plan S recommends not to support hybrid journals in their current form. Instead, it encourages various transformative agreements with publishers of subscription journals for their transition to fully OA journals by gradual increment of their OA content and by offsetting subscription income from payments for publishing services to avoid double payments (2). For example, the ESAC Transformative Agreement Registry has compiled a list of more than 160 transformative agreements signed all over the world between large scientific publishers and consortia/institutions (3). Plan S underlines that all OA publication fees would be covered by the funders. Though primarily focused on scholarly articles, cOalition S plans to provide recommendations for monographs, book chapters, and research data in the near future as well.