Science and its sister journals will test a new open access policy for some researchers supported by the Plan S group of funders.Credit: Loic Venance / AFP / Getty
The publisher of Science will allow some authors who publish in its popular subscription journals to openly share their accepted manuscripts online under liberal terms meaning anyone can reproduce or redistribute the work.
The change ensures that scientists with grants from some funding agencies who insist on open-access (OA) publishing under the daring Plan S initiative can still publish in the Science family of subscriber journals. About two dozen funders signed up for Plan S, which formally began on January 1, 2021, although individual agencies have different start dates.
Over the past two months, many selective journal entries have introduced options for writers to pay fees to have their papers OA published, in response to Plan S. But the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC, which publishes Science, says he wants to avoid it because he is concerned about introducing OA publication levies that could be financially out of the reach of authors.
The new AAAS policy allows researchers funded by some Plan S agencies, instead of freely posting accepted versions of their articles online once their papers appear – and under open licenses that allow someone else to redistribute or reproduce the manuscripts. (Some Plan S agencies have not yet finalized their manuscript sharing policies, such as the UK UK funder, Research and Innovation, so the policy does not apply to them yet.)
The AAAS has already allowed this kind of immediate participation of authors, sometimes called green open access, but the conditions state that the manuscripts can only be shared on personal or institutional web pages and cannot be redistributed. Researchers also had to wait six months before they could place manuscripts in repositories such as PubMed Central. This has not satisfied Plan S funders, who say that if scientists cannot publish OA in journals (a process sometimes called golden OA), then they must share their accepted manuscripts under full open licenses as soon as they are published.
Legal obligation
In July 2020, some Plan S funders even said that it would make it a legal condition for awards that authors retain the rights to openly share their accepted manuscripts – no matter what the publication agreement of a magazine.
The AAAS now says that scientists funded by Plan S agencies that accept this ‘rights conservation scheme’ (RRS) will be able to apply open licenses to their shared manuscripts. No other scientist who publishes in AAAS journals will be able to do that.
Plan S has always enabled authors to adhere to its policies through this kind of green OA, says Johan Rooryck, the executive director of cOAlition S, the group of funders who have joined the initiative. “We are delighted that AAAS is updating its policy to explicitly allow the sharing of these manuscripts,” he said in a statement.
The new arrangement, which applies to all research submitted to the scientific family journals from the beginning of this year, can see a lot Science manuscripts shared with open licenses. According to a report by Clarivate Analytics in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 31% of the articles were published in Science in 2017 recognized grants from a Plan S funder.
Some other magazines have also adopted green OA to comply with Plan S. New England Journal of Medicine told funders in October that it would allow green OA in 2021 for, for example, Plan-S-funded scientists. The London Royal Society allows green OA in its magazines for years and allows it to be done under public licenses if funders require it.
Routes to access
Other highly selective subscription magazines have adapted to Plan S in various ways. In November, publisher Springer Nature announced that it would offer OA to Nature magazines for € 9,500 (US $ 11,500) per paper; it is also experimenting with a program to lower prices at some of its magazines. (Earth is editorially independent of its publisher.)
And in December, publisher Elsevier in Amsterdam announced a series of OA options for Cell Press magazines, with a cost of € 8,500 to publish OA in Cell and € 7,600 for other magazines.
But many scientists are worried that these prices are too high. Although Plan S funders may pay the fees for their scientists, many other researchers will not be able to afford the OA option. (Elsevier said they would drop OA fees for researchers in the lowest-income countries and lower it for some others.) Therefore, the AAAS opted for green OA, rather than including gold OA in its subscription journals bring, the publisher explained.
“This approach reflects the concern of AAAS that facilitating open access through gold routes alone places unnecessary financial obligations on authors, which could freeze in place or further exacerbate inequalities for authors across race, gender, geography, disciplines and institutions. statement.
Publishing rights
“It’s a bold move to opt for a green OA solution to meet Plan S requirements, and it’s noteworthy that it points to the inequalities associated with the business model for article processing,” says Stephen Curry , a structural biologist at Imperial College London. .
The AAAS approach does mean that most scientists who publish in its journals will not have a complete OA option, says Lisa Hinchliffe, a librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign. “It is unfortunate that it perpetuates the differences in the ecosystem, where the privileges of certain publishing channels are extended to certain scholars, but not others – in this case, which reflects the unequal acceptance of Plan S policy, even within the family of Plan S funders. , “she says.
How to finance a wholesale switch from a pay-to-read model to an OA model remains very controversial. Some journals, hoping to slowly ease their way of subscribing to OA business models, have entered into agreements in which libraries or institutions pay a lump sum that covers the cost of their authors to read content and to publish OA. In December, 11 publishers argued against adopting green OA, saying it would undermine progress towards a full OA, and that the version of the article, not the accepted manuscript, should be the version of the survey. be.
The AAAS wants to try the green OA model for its subscriber journals as a ‘year-long experiment to see if it is sustainable’, says Bill Moran, the publisher of the Science family of journals.
Whether green OA can work for the publisher in the long run (which also publishes a gold OA magazine, Scientific progress) is “the biggest question we have struggled with”, he adds. Since the AAAS already allows manuscripts to be shared – if not so liberally – he hopes that the change will not mean that libraries or other communities reduce the subscriptions that society supports.