Plan S: The Latest Push for Open Access in Europe

A group of European research funders has announced an open-access plan for publications, ‘Plan S,’ that could significantly impact scientific publishing. Starting in 2020, scientists who receive funding from the European agencies who have signed on to Plan S would have to make the literature that results from their research immediately free to read upon publication.

The policy was officially launched by Science Europe, a science research advocacy group based in Brussels, and so far, 11 European funding agencies have signed on to Plan S, forming cOAlition S. The plan requires open-access publishing, even banning hybrid publishing: this eliminates the potential for scientists funded by cOAlition S members to publish in 85% of journals, including leading publications Nature and Science.

The release of this plan responds to the increase in open-access publishing, whether done immediately, with a hybrid journal, or after a delay.

 

 

Data Source: UUK (2017)/BMC Med. 10, 124 (2012).

Graph created by Springer Nature 2018.

 

 

 

While Plan S does push for broader international open-access policies, it does not change the policies of U.S. funding agencies. The open-access changes for European-funded research is coming fast, but the same movement is happening much more slowly in the U.S.: in a Nature news article about Plan S, Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was quoted saying, “[Plan S] is roughly what we would want after about 15 years of funder experimentation with weaker policies.”