But representative of open-access initiative says publishers are preparing to comply, not complaining
A publishing consultant has criticised one of the policies of Plan S—the initiative in which funders are requiring researchers they support to make resulting papers openly available immediately through venues that meet various requirements—saying it “is likely impossible” that smaller and less wealthy publishers will be able to comply.
But one of the leaders of the initiative has countered that publishers themselves have not complained they will be unable to follow the policy, and added that smaller publishers have in fact been aligning with it more quickly than their larger counterparts.
Publishing consultant David Crotty made the criticisms in a 22 July article published on the website Scholarly Kitchen. It focused on a requirement for publishers that are transforming journals so that an increasing share of their content is open access. The requirement states they must submit an annual report to Plan S with data such as download and citation numbers, separated into categories for open and subscription papers.
“Parsing out open-access article data from non-open access articles is neither simple nor easy,” Crotty wrote. “Reporting compliance is largely out of reach for anyone other than the larger and wealthier.”
No publisher push-back
But Plan S head of strategy Robert Kiley told Research Professional News that no publishers have yet informed the initiative they are unable to comply with the policy. The policy will not become a requirement until 2022, but Kiley said a request for baseline data before then is being met faster by smaller publishers.
“To date, no publisher small or large has contacted [Plan S funder group] Coalition S to indicate that the usage reporting requirements—which come into effect in 2022—are the barrier to adopting this [transformative journal] model,” Kiley said.
He said the request for data was to “help determine whether open-access content has broader reach than subscription content”, and that the data would help encourage more funders and publishers to support transformative journals, which are one of several routes to compliance with Plan S.
Kiley said Plan S funders hope larger publishers will share their targets for their transformative journals before the end of the month.
A version of this article also appeared in Research Europe