Five years ago, cOAlition S, a funding consortium of 12 European national research funding agencies, announced the open access publishing plan "Plan S". This plan is committed to ending the journal subscription model and accelerating the transition of journal paid subscription models to Open Access (OA).
However, as the influence of Plan S has rapidly increased in the academic publishing world, a new obstacle to academic communication has emerged: the cost of publishing an open access article has become increasingly expensive.
Recently, cOAlition S, the organization behind this revolutionary publishing plan, announced its next bolder and more disruptive publishing plan. Proposals for the new plan describe a future "scholar-led" and "academic community-based" open research communication system: researchers will not have to pay to read or publish, can retain ownership of their results, and decide whether to publish their papers. When to publish.
All content related to thesis publication, such as original research articles, peer reviews, editorial decisions, scientific communications, etc., are controlled by the academic community and respond to academic needs.
If this vision is realized, the field of scientific publishing will once again be revolutionized.
The beginning of great changes
Open access is a completely new mechanism that is different from the traditional academic publishing model. While respecting the rights of authors, it allows anyone to access, download, copy, disseminate and use published academic research resources online for free, promoting wider academic exchanges and dissemination, and accelerating the progress and innovation of scientific research.
In the 1990s, as journal subscription fees increased year by year, university libraries around the world could not afford enough funds to purchase the academic publications they wanted, which seriously hindered academic exchange and dissemination.
At the same time, the rapid development and popularization of the Internet has made online publishing possible, and some scholars have found that the Internet provides a more open, free and cost-saving platform for them to exchange academic results. From this, the open access model emerged.
Although academics and science policymakers unanimously agree with the concept of open access, its actual promotion progress is quite slow, and this situation changed only after the launch of Plan S.
According to Plan S, cOAlition S requires all researchers it funds to publish their research results publicly so that anyone can read and access them for free. They can choose to publish in an open access journal or post a near-final version of their manuscript online.
For a time, the emergence of Plan S shocked some academic publishers.
Plan S challenges the dominant traditional subscription model in which academic publications typically charge readers subscription fees as a source of revenue to survive.
Plan S was originally scheduled to launch in 2020, but was later postponed to 2021. During this period, compromises were made to the original plan. Ultimately, after consultation, Plan S decided to support a "hybrid" publishing model for the journal, which would include both open access and subscription articles.
Publishers are scrambling to launch open access products in early 2021, before the order comes into effect, to cope with the upheaval in the industry brought about by Plan S while maintaining the sustainability of their businesses.
Five years after Plan S was announced, observers say it has succeeded in accelerating the push for open access and even prompting reluctant publishers to introduce publishing models that meet its requirements.
According to estimates from the large database Dimensions, the number of published papers worldwide in 2022 will total more than 4 million, of which open access articles account for half.
Since its establishment, cOAlition S has expanded its number of members from 12 to 28, including the British funding giant Wellcome, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the United States, International organizations and institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
urgent matter
Publishing open access research articles usually only requires authors to pay an article processing charge (APC).
Once upon a time, readers had to pay hefty subscription fees to read academic papers, and publishers made huge profits. Today, readers can read journal articles for free, and the boom in open access has forced publishers to find other ways to increase their fees for APCs to maintain considerable profits.
This means that only researchers with sufficient funds to pay for the publication of their papers can publish open access.
Dutch publisher Elsevier launched a pilot project of OA "mirror journals" from 2018 to 2020 to explore a new open access publishing model.
As the name suggests, "mirror journals" are mirror images of existing subscription journals. They are published by the same publisher, have a common editorial board, the same peer review process and selection criteria, and the URL for submissions remains unchanged. The only difference is that after the contributor's manuscript is accepted, he needs to choose whether to publish the article in the original journal or a mirror journal. Papers published in mirror journals are open access articles.
Emilio Bruna, an ecologist and Latin American studies scholar at the University of Florida, and his team conducted research on the project and found that about 80% of the first authors of articles in mirror journals were from high-income countries, and there were no third authors from low-income countries. One author.
Juan Pablo Alperin, an advocate of open access publishing and an academic communication researcher at Simon Fraser University in Canada, said: "APC is not conducive to global academic development, and Plan S is complicit in its continued growth."
Publishing inevitably incurs costs, and reading and publishing should not be a financial burden on researchers. cOAlition S recognizes these concerns and says supporting more equitable open access publishing models is a priority.
In September this year, cOAlition S announced the establishment of a working group to study alternative publishing models that do not rely on APC. One possible model is called Diamond Open Access (DOA), which allows journals to operate with financial support from funders or institutions without charging fees to authors or readers.
update iteration
The new plan, “Towards Responsible Publishing,” seems to acknowledge that the first phase of Plan S’s development is on the “downhill slope” and marks the second phase of the scientific publishing revolution accelerated by cOAlition S five years ago.
The person in charge of cOAlition S said that the funding alliance still maintains its "original intention", but its solutions need to be updated and continuously developed.
It proposes an example model called "Publish, Review, Curate": authors publicly publish their preprint articles on a dedicated platform and submit their papers for review; academic peers control the peer review process for free ;Peer review reports, revisions, and editorial decisions are publicly released. Costs will be borne by a variety of organizations including libraries, funders, governments and universities.
Publishers and journals will still have a role to play in sorting peer-reviewed articles according to quality or topic, but will not decide when preprints or peer-reviewed articles are published.
cOAlition S is not the originator of the idea of “academic-led”.
In January this year, eLife, a "pioneer" journal in life sciences, made similar changes to its research publishing process: as long as the peer review process is completed, eLife will publish the paper together with review comments as a "reviewed preprint" published in the form. Contributors can decide independently whether to modify the content of the paper based on review comments. Readers can freely access the article, and the journal will no longer make decisions about rejection or acceptance.
The shift earned eLife warm praise from scientific researchers, but also sparked sharp criticism.
Some academic editors of eLife expressed great dissatisfaction with this, fearing that it would weaken the brand reputation they have worked so hard to build. Some of them wrote privately to the journal's editor-in-chief, Michael Eisen, saying they would resign if the plan was fully implemented. As a result, eLife has delayed its complete transition to the new model in the face of many headwinds.
Before the new proposal was released, cOAlition S's decision-makers anticipated that they would likely cause greater controversy and receive more opposition in the future.
Robert Kiley, head of strategy at cOAlition S, said: “I would be surprised if the new proposals are well received.”
cOAlition S is currently working with Research Consulting, a research consultancy based in Nottingham, UK, to co-lead a six-month feedback survey to gather the thoughts of the global research community and ask whether the program meets their needs.
Reference links:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03342-6
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00883-6
https://www.coalition-s.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Towards_Responsible_Publishing_web.pdf
(The original title is "Is it too expensive to publish a paper? A bold reform plan is being implemented")