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Scholarly Communication & Open Access: Resources

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Plan S

Plan S is an initiative by a group of research funders to make publicly funded research outputs fully and immediately open access.  The international consortium (cOAlition S) is coordinated by Science Europe and includes Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), UK Research and Innovation, Research Council of Norway and others and is supported by the European Research Council and the European Commission. cOAlition S aims for a new model of publishing, characterised not only by immediate, free online access to, but also by largely unrestricted use and re-use of scholarly publications.

The key principle of Plan S is:

After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results from research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.

Ten further principles apply, including:  

  • Authors retain copyright and should publish under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC-BY .
  • Open access publication fees (APCs) should be standard across Europe and capped.  Fees should be paid for by funders or institutions and not authors.
  • Outputs should be made immediately available in compliant open access journals or platforms.  Hybrid journals (which mix open access articles with subscriptions) are not acceptable. Embargoes are not acceptable.  Examples of open access platforms are HRB Open Research and Wellcome Open Research.
  • Depositing in institutional repositories in addition to OA journals or platforms is encouraged, immediately on publication (Version of Record, or Author’s Accepted Manuscript) without embargo.
  • Publishing open access with a CC BY licence in a journal which is covered by a transformative agreement is acceptable.  Transformative agreements have clear and time-specified commitments to a full open access transition.

Full details of the principles here.  

Implementation guidance has been provided by cOAlition S to flesh out the details of the principles and to include technical requirements.  Feedback was sought from interested parties and based on this feedback, a new edition of the guidance is expected in Spring 2019.

CONUL (Consortium of National and University Libraries) Response to Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S

The Office for Scholarly Communication in the University of Cambridge have published a blog post called Plan S – links, commentary and news items, which attempts to compile a list of discussions and documents around Plan S.

cOAlition S recognises that the new model calls for research funders, institutions, researchers, learned societies, librarians and publishers to work together towards a system of scholarly publishing that is more accessible, efficient, fair and transparent.

Article Versions & Sharing Your Work

The Green Open Access route satisfies open access mandates by funding agencies such as SFI, HRB and HEA. This model allows you to deposit a version of your article in an institutional repository such as the RCSI Repository.

Knowing which version of your work you can deposit can be difficult to ascertain. Sherpa Romeo can be useful in helping to determine what your rights are; this online resource aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis. Information from here must be double checked against the policies of individuals journals however as policies change over time.

Terminology can differ from publisher to publisher; the table below should help you to decide which version is necessary for your particular needs. 

 

 

 Version Stages

 Definition  

 Alternative terms

 Submitted Version

                                                                               The version originally submitted to the  journal     before peer review and corrections

 Preprint, Author's original draft

 Accepted Version   

 The accepted version, after peer review but   prior to the final copy-editing and layout

 ​Postprint, Accepted Manuscript, Author’s   Accepted Manuscript

 Published Version

 An exact digital replica of the published article

 ​Postprint, Version of record, Publisher's   version

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ontent credit RCSI Library, Image credit: Ryan Regier, CC BY. Book image by Benny Forsberg.

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship (Full Movie) CC BY 4.0 from Paywall The Movie on Vimeo.

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, produced by Jason Schmitt, provides focus on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. For more information please visit: Paywallthemovie.com

Plan S Update

Following a wide consultation exercise revisions have been made to Plan S, the Science Europe-led funder initiative launched last year to push for more open access publishing.

The timeline for compliance has been pushed back to 2021, and some of the criteria for repositories and transitioning from subscription journals have been adjusted.
The main principles remain, that:
No scholarly publication should be locked behind a paywall;
Open Access should be immediate i.e., without embargoes
This can be achieved through an open access journal or an open repository such as the RCSI one, using either the published version (Version of Record) or the peer-reviewed manuscript (Author Accepted Manuscript).
 
More details at: