Open Access e-Scientific Publishing: Elected among 2018 Nature’s 10 Top Influencers – ROBERT-JAN SMITS: A bureaucrat launched a drive to transform science publishing
Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN,
Editor-in-Chief, https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/
UPDATED on 8/13/2019
Plan S, the program to crack down on scientific journals’ paywalls led by European funders, last week fleshed out and relaxed some of the rules researchers will have to abide by. The update addresses concerns raised by researchers, librarians, and scientific publishers after initial guidelines came out in November 2018. It allows more time before researchers will have to publish their papers with full, immediate open access (OA) and drops, for now, the proposed cap on publishing fees that funders pay to OA journals.
The architects of Plan S “have engaged in a good quality dialogue” with the people who will deal with the plan’s consequences, says Lidia Borrell-Damián, director for research and innovation at the European University Association in Brussels. As a result, the revised guidelines seem “much more nuanced and more realistic” than the initial set, says astrophysicist Luke Drury, former president of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin.
Still unclear is whether the changes will convince other funders to join the movement (Science, 4 January, p. 11). And they have not mollified the plan’s fiercest detractors, who maintain it restricts their freedom to publish. “The changes are cosmetic and trivial. They more or less ignored the critique,” says Lynn Kamerlin, a structural biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who co-authored an open letter against Plan S in November 2018 that now has about 1800 signatories.
Launched in September 2018, Plan S will require immediate OA for scientific papers stemming from research funded by the members of cOAlition S, a group that now has 19 public and private funders. One of the main changes in the update is a 1-year extension: Plan S rules will apply at the latest to research proposals solicited by funders starting in 2021, instead of 2020. That means the mandate will apply to papers published starting in 2022 or 2023, John-Arne Røttingen, chief executive of the Research Council of Norway in Oslo and a Plan S leader, said last week.
In another big change that several critics had called for, Plan S has shelved the idea of capping the amount funders will pay for article-processing charges (APCs), which some journals charge to publish OA articles. Instead, the funders will require a breakdown of what’s behind APCs so that researchers can compare publishing venues before choosing one. (The funders may later introduce a cap “if unreasonable price levels are observed.”)
“It is significant that cOAlition S listened to feedback that different approaches to peer review, as part of publishing, require different APCs,” said Bill Moran, publisher of Science in Washington, D.C. (Science‘s News section is editorially independent.)
Many publishers are happy to provide transparency about their fees, says Niamh O’Connor, chair-elect of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers in London. “It’s not uncommon for authors or referees to wonder about them.”
Plan S funders hope more transparency will help authors make efficient, evidence-based decisions about where to publish, rather than relying on journals’ perceived quality. That would support a secondary goal for cOAlition S—to shake up research assessment. Plan S now includes a pledge to base funding decisions on the intrinsic merit of researchers’ work—not the names or impact factors of journals where they published previously.
The revised guidelines also spell out Plan S funders’ support for the Open Access 2020 Initiative, which encourages national consortia of institutions to negotiate “read-and-publish” deals with publishers. The agreements allow researchers at those institutions to read paywalled content and publish OA papers for a single fee. But because the often-lengthy contract negotiations can be burdensome for publishers, cOAlition S now says it will develop model contracts to help smaller publishers enter these so-called “transformative agreements.” It also now offers a “transformative journal” option, in which Plan S funders pay OA fees for authors to publish in subscription journals, providing those publications reduce subscription fees to offset their income from APCs and commit to 100% OA within an agreed time frame.
The updated guidance also clarifies Plan S’s stance on hybrid journals—publications that charge subscription fees as well as APCs for authors who choose to publish OA—that lack the “transformative” commitment to full OA. The cOAlition S funders won’t pay hybrid journals’ APCs, but researchers can pay with other funds and remain Plan S compliant.
Finally, Plan S’s revamped rules give more prominence to its version of “green” OA, in which scientists post peer-reviewed papers in OA repositories (Science, 17 May, p. 620) as soon as they are published in a paywalled journal. The new guidelines also relax the technical requirements for such repositories.
Overall, cOAlition S “really seem[s] to have listened to the research community. There are no major sticking points anymore,” says Gareth O’Neill, a linguist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and past president of the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers. “Now, we’ll watch them, see what works and what doesn’t, and hold them accountable.”
UPDATED by 1/15/2019
Entire editorial board resigns over open access The editorial board of an influential scientometrics journal — the Journal of Informetrics — has resigned and launched a competing free-to-read journal. The board wanted Elsevier to offer free access to detailed citation data, among other things. “Elsevier needs to be able to continue investing in ways that add value to the research process, which it cannot do if it gives this value away for free,” said the publisher. The former editors have launched a competing free-to-read journal called Quantitative Science Studies. |
2018 Nature’s 10
- Yuan Cao, Graphene wrangler
- Viviane Slon, Humanity’s historian
- He Jiankui, CRISPR rogue
- Jess Wade, Diversity champion
- Valérie Masson-Delmotte, Earth monitor
- Anthony Brown, Star mapper
- Bee Yin Yeo, Force for the environment
- Barbara Rae-Venter, DNA detective
- Robert-Jan Smits, Open-access leader
- Makoto Yoshikawa, Asteroid hunter
ROBERT-JAN SMITS: Open-access leader: A bureaucrat launched a drive to transform science publishing.
BY HOLLY ELSE
Credit: Artur Eranosian/European Commission
The architect of this year’s bold push to get rid of paywalls in science publishing says he got his ideas from an unlikely source: the publishers themselves.
In March, Robert-Jan Smits was tasked by the European Union’s research commissioner, Carlos Moedas, with a special one-year mission: to get more research papers published outside journal paywalls, and fast. A veteran science-policy bureaucrat, Smits decided to go to the source: he asked big publishers how he could do it. They told him that if the organizations that pay for research insisted the findings had to be published openly, journals would have to adapt.
So that’s what Smits set out to persuade research funders to do — in a plan launched in September that has sent shock waves through science publishing.
Smits has spent decades pulling the science-policy strings at the European Commission, and, until his current assignment, had served eight years as the director-general of research. He was ideally connected to begin rallying Europe’s agencies with the idea, dubbed Plan S for ‘science, speed, solution, shock’, as he puts it. As Nature went to press, 16 funders had signed the plan; they require that the results of work they support be made freely available at the time of publication, starting in 2020.
Publishers have been dictating how research is published for decades, Smits says. “Now it is the funders calling the shots, and we will do things differently.”
It’s too early to know what the ultimate impact of Plan S on research publishing will be. Its details are open for consultation, and much might depend on how many other funders adopt the idea — but it will at least improve access to research, says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Smits has been overwhelmed with messages of support. But the initiative has also met with resistance: several publishers have said it could put them out of business, and some researchers have said that they don’t want their choice of where to publish to be restricted.
Smits is no stranger to disrupting the status quo in European science. In 2007, he was instrumental in setting up the excellence-focused European Research Council (ERC) funding agency — when, he says, very few member states wanted it. “We had to go country by country to convince people that we needed it,” he says.
Those who have worked with Smits are not surprised by his ability to get consensus on controversial policies. “Robert-Jan has a fantastic memory, of people, events, documents, policies. His networking capacity is spectacular,” says Helga Nowotny, a former president of the ERC.
Smits’ short tenure as open-access tsar is almost over. Next year, he will leave to become chair of the Eindhoven University of Technology in his native Netherlands. “It’s time for me to leave the commission at what I consider my height,” he says.
SOURCE
Other Related articles published in this Open Access Online Journal include the following:
University of California accounts for nearly 10% of all published research in the United States. It’s also a significant partner of Elsevier, which publishes about 18% of all UC output and collects more than 25% of the university’s $40-million overall subscription budget.
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
‘Plan S’ of Eleven research funders in Europe will make all scientific works free to read as soon as they are published – New policy if adopted could determine the Future of Global Journal Subscription as doomed
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/open-access-scientific-journal/
Three Genres in e-Scientific Publishing AND Three Scientists’ Dilemmas
Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
e-Scientific Publishing: The Competitive Advantage of a Powerhouse for Curation of Scientific Findings and Methodology Development for e-Scientific Publishing – LPBI Group, A Case in Point
Author and Editor-in-Chief: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD RN
Innovations in electronic Scientific Publishing (eSP): Case Studies in Marketing eContent, Curation Methodology, Categories of Research Functions, Interdisciplinary conceptual innovations by Cross Section of Categories, Exposure to Frontiers of Science by Real Time Press coverage of Scientific Conferences
Editor-in-Chief http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
FIVE years of e-Scientific Publishing @pharmaceuticalintellicence.com, Top Articles by Author and by e-Views >1,000, 4/27/2012 to 1/29/2018
Editor-in-Chief: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
e-Recognition via Friction-free Collaboration over the Internet: “Open Access to Curation of Scientific Research”
Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
Leave a Reply