Campaign encourages researchers to assert rights, while blasting some publishers as “obstructive and unclear”
The Plan S open-access initiative has launched a campaign to convince authors of academic papers to retain copyright over their work, describing some publishers as being “unclear and obstructive” about their policies around author rights.
Under Plan S, a group of mainly European funders are requiring the researchers they support to make resulting papers openly available immediately, with copyright retained by either the authors or their institutions.
Launched on 27 April, the Plan S campaign provides free resources to help explain the steps researchers need to take to assert their intellectual property rights. Doing so enables them to deposit a version of their paper in a repository as a way to meet the Plan S requirement for immediate open access.
Coalition S, the funders signed up to Plan S, said that since the initiative launched its rights retention strategy, some publishers have insisted on “the author agreeing to an embargo by using a contract, or other tactics, that conflicts with their grant condition”. They said that this comes at “an advanced stage of the peer review process” when authors are reluctant to say no.
As part of their new campaign, Coalition S has created a pre-submission letter template and a submission cover letter template to “help authors ask for the clarity they need before peer review proceeds”.
The group also announced on 26 April that the American Chemical Society has committed its full portfolio of more than 60 hybrid journals—offering both subscription and open-access publishing routes to authors—to become Plan S-aligned Transformative Journals.
These are journals that commit to transforming to full open access at a rate set by Coalition S.