It has recently been suggested that to support the development of open access (OA) in Europe, access to open research might be ‘geoblocked’, or limited, to those countries that were involved in funding the research and its publication. In this post, Martin Paul Eve, argues that to do this is not only technically and practically very difficult, but would also […]
Category: Plan S
AmeliCA before Plan S – The Latin American Initiative to develop a cooperative, non-commercial, academic led, system of scholarly communication
Open access is often discussed as a process of flipping the existing closed subscription based model of scholarly communication to an open one. However, in Latin America an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing has been in place for over a decade. In this post, Eduardo Aguado-López and Arianna Becerril-Garcia discuss open access developments in Latin America and the AmeliCA initiative to develop a […]
Learned Societies, the key to realising an open access future?
Plan S, a funder led initiative to drive open access to research, will have significant impacts on the ways in which academics publish and communicate their research. However, beyond simply changing the way academics disseminate their research, it will also influence how learned societies, the organisations tasked with representing academics in particular disciplines, operate, as many currently depend on revenues […]
The gold rush: Why open access will boost publisher profits
An important justification for transitioning from a subscription based journal publishing system to an open access journal publishing system, has been that whereas printing and distributing physical copies of journals is an expensive process, the cost of digital publication and dissemination are marginal. In this post Shaun Khoo argues that whilst a shift to gold (pay to publish) open access […]
What the history of copyright in academic publishing tells us about Open Research
It has become a fact of academic life, that when researchers publish papers in academic journals, they sign away the copyright to their research, or licence it for distribution. However, from a historical perspective this practice is a relatively recent phenomenon. In this post Aileen Fyfe, explores how copyright has become intertwined with scholarly publishing and presents three insights from […]
The value of a journal is the community it creates, not the papers it publishes
When we think about the value of journal publishing, we have a tendency to think in terms of costs per article and the potential for new technologies to reduce these costs. In this post, Lucy Montgomery and Cameron Neylon argue that we should instead focus on the social life of journals and the knowledge communities they sustain. Taking this as […]
Making Waves – Assessing the potential impacts of Plan S on the scholarly communications ecosystem
The potential impacts of Plan S (a funder led plan to accelerate a global flip to open access to research publications) on the wider research ecosystem are only beginning to be understood. Citing evidence from a recent report by the Institute for Scientific Information on Plan S funded research papers, Dr Martin Szomszor, outlines what the impact of the plan might […]
Plan S and the Global South – What do countries in the Global South stand to gain from signing up to Europe’s open access strategy?
Plan S raises challenging questions for the Global South. Even if Plan S fails to achieve its objectives the growing determination in Europe to trigger a “global flip” to open access suggests developing countries will have to develop an alternative strategy. In this post Richard Poynder asks: what might that strategy be? Announced last year, Plan S is an initiative […]
Plan S – Time to decide what we stand for
Reflecting on the recent consultation period for Plan S, a funder led proposal for achieving universal open access to research papers, Jon Tennant argues that whereas, the consultation has in many ways followed the contours of previous OA debates, OA has now become an unavoidable part of academic life and has moved into the mainstream. For this reason, he argues […]
Taking Stock of the Feedback on Plan S Implementation Guidance
In this repost, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe reviews the feedback submitted in response to the Plan S consultation and highlights 7 themes that emerged from the thousands of pages submissions made to cOAlition S. Like many others, I found myself reading response after response after response to cOAlition S’ call for feedback on the Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S last week. […]