A response of the Fair Open Access Alliance
We write to provide a counter view to the recent open letter (“Plan S: Too Far, Too
Risky”), [https://sites.google.com/view/plansopenletter/open-letter] partly based on our FOAA recommendations for the implementation of Plan S.
[https://www.fairopenaccess.org/2018/10/21/foaa-recommendations-on-the-implementation-of-plan-s/]
We are glad to note that the researchers who have signed the open letter support open
access as their very first principle. However, the letter itself goes on to make a number
of highly problematic and logically fallacious statements with which we strongly disagree
and here contest.
More broadly, the letter fails to provide any solution to address the problematic situation
academia has maneuvered itself into with regards to scholarly publishing. As it stands,
the open letter is a set of demands on the funders, without any responsibility assumed
by the researchers themselves for the ongoing serials crisis, nor for providing solutions.
In this document we review the items in the open letter systematically.
1. Hybrid (society) journals
The Letter states: “The complete ban on hybrid (society) journals of high quality is a big
problem, especially for chemistry.” This statement is not correct. First of all, Plan S does
not ban hybrid journals, it simply aims at persuading funders to stop paying APCs to
them as these titles have proved an ineffectual mechanism for a transition to OA.
Beyond the fact that it is unclear why chemistry thinks itself exceptional here, Robert-Jan
Smits has explained on several occasions that Plan S will allow researchers to publish in
hybrid journals íf the article is published simultaneously in a repository or archive
without an embargo and under a CC BY license. In the Wellcome Trust’s
implementation of Plan S, the version that must be available is the AAM (author’s
accepted manuscript). Several publishers, such as Emerald and SAGE, already offer
zero-embargo green OA. In addition, while coalition funders will not pay APCs for hybrid
journals, they will not prevent authors from finding research funding from other sources.
Contrary to the claims of the Letter, Plan S takes into account the full landscape of open
access, as clearly acknowledged in Principle 3: “In case such high quality Open Access
journals or platforms do not yet exist, the Funders will, in a coordinated way, provide
incentives to establish and support them when appropriate; support will also be provided
for Open Access infrastructures where necessary;” and Principle 8 “The importance of
open archives and repositories for hosting research outputs is acknowledged because of
their long-term archiving function and their potential for editorial innovation;".
The open letter claims that researchers (at least in chemistry) “won’t even be able to
legally read the most important (society) journals.” This is nonsense. This claim implies
that researchers will cease to have legal access to these journals through subscriptions.
If this were the case, it is very unclear how Plan S could be held responsible. The intent
of Plan S is that journals flip to open access which would mean they were legally
accessible to everyone. However, if as seems to be claimed in the letter, libraries were
to cancel subscriptions, this would not be in response to Plan S but due to the
unsustainability of ever increasing subscription costs. The letter goes on in the second
point to acknowledge the issue with exploding costs to subscriptions without offering any
solutions to the problem. Furthermore, the authors assume without argument or
evidence that all journals (at least in chemistry) “with a valuable and rigorous peer-
review system of high quality” will either fold or fail to adapt.
The open letter also assumes that Plan S will lead to the death of learned societies.
Indeed, learned societies that publish academic journals sometimes derive considerable
profits or surpluses from the subscription system, and have benefited substantially in the
past decade from funder requirements to make research open access under the hybrid
system. As an example, the American Chemical Society has a highly complex fee structure
for article processing charges, [https://pubs.acs.org/pb-assets/documents/4authors/ACS_SalesChart.pdf ]
taking full advantage of the situation, where a funded non-member from an institution that does not subscribe
must pay $4000 for immediate access (a requirement of the funding paying the APC) and a surcharge of
$1000 for CC BY (again a requirement of the funding paying the APC), a total of $5,000
– when the average APC is approximately $2700. These profits or surpluses are often
used to support research activities. As a result, learned societies have a financial
interest in maintaining the subscription, and specifically the hybrid, system. It is true that
there are large differences between research fields here, in that chemistry derives more
money from the (hybrid) subscription system than other fields.
A more productive approach to the conversation would be to focus on alternatives to
subscriptions that pay for society income rather than attacking Plan S. For it is, indeed,
bizarre that library budgets should bear the brunt of funding disciplinary activities. That
said, an alternative income for scientific societies is possible under a publication-fee
model as well. For example, the publication fee is capped under Plan S, which allows for
a difference between the real cost of publishing and the cap paid by the funders which
could be reserved for the learned society. This solution does require that the cost of
publishing is made completely transparent by publishers (societies in this instance).
FOAA recommended cost transparency as a crucial factor for the implementation of
Plan S. We believe publishers should be required to provide the actual breakdown of
costs contained in the publication fee, and make this information publicly available. An
example of how this works in practice is the 2016 release by eLife of their costs to
publish. [https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/a058ec77/what-it-costs-to-publish]
Without this transparency the cap will be established as a new price-point that
will allow publishers to renegotiate it every few years, and allow those with actual costs
below the cap to raise their costs to meet the cap. A subset of publishers have already
agreed to the FOAA cost transparency proposal in the Transparent Transition to Open
Access (TTOA consortium).
2. A transition from hybrid to full Open Access
We further recommend that a policy be defined to help publishers and Editors-in-Chief of
hybrid journals to transition to full open access within a 3-4 year period, reporting on
progress every year. The transition of hybrid journals to non-hybrid or full Open Access
journals will need an infrastructure in line with Principle 3 of Plan S: FOAA has taken an
initiative to help journals transition to open access in the aftermath of Plan S with its
TTOA platform.
Nobody wishes to ‘ban’ society journals: the request here is to use imaginative ways to
make the transition of those journals to an open access model, which would do much
more for the societies’ disciplinary advocacy work. A number of journals have already
gone that route, and have – in a very short time - been able to fully maintain their
readership and reputation in their communities (see the highly successful transition of
the editorial board of Elsevier subscription journal Lingua to Fair Open Access Glossa,
and that of Springer’s Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics to Algebraic Combinatorics).
These journals have shown that the scientific reputation of a journal lies with its editorial
team, not with the name or with the publisher. If editors in linguistics and mathematics
can flip their prestigious journals to open access, at no cost to their reputation, editors in
other fields should be able to do so as well. A transition to full open access is the best
thing editors of prestigious journals can do to help establish the reputation of younger
scientists with access to cOALition S funds.
Further, the authors of the Letter claim that they “expect that a large part of the world will
not (fully) tie in with Plan S”. In the meantime, important funders such as the Wellcome
Trust and the Gates Foundation have already joined Plan S. For Plan S to succeed, it is
essential that not only funders take a principled stand, but that editors of hybrid journals
join forces to urge their publishers to flip the journals to full open access.
3. The cost of publication
The signatories of the letter say they understand concerns about exploding costs of
journal subscriptions. But they also state that “with its strong focus on the Gold OA
publication model, in which researchers pay high APCs for each publication, the total
costs of scholarly dissemination will likely rise instead of reduce under Plan S”.
However, Plan S does not mention APCs nor Gold OA. It refers only to Publication Fees:
this is a much broader term that encompasses multiple options. One example is the
SCOAP3 consortium where libraries pay a ‘subscription’ to journals that are openly
accessible. This approach opens the possibility that no-fee journals can also be
compensated for their efforts. Thus, Plan S provides funding for all publication venues
with the exception of hybrid journals. Furthermore, APCs need not make the total costs
of dissemination rise further: the average cost to the international community of a
research article under the current subscription system is currently about $3800.
[https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2148961_7/component/file_2149096/content] Even a
generous cap of $2000 per article will almost halve that cost. Plan S clearly states that it
will cap open access publication fees, a fact that the signatories of the Letter ignore.
There is no reason that researchers would be confronted with high APCs if editors are
incentivized to transition their high-quality journals to open access with a standardized
publication fee paid for every article.
4. Academic freedom
The Open Letter states that ‘Plan S is a serious violation of academic freedom’. Yet the
claim that academic freedom is being violated is overstated. At its heart, academic
freedom concerns the freedom of inquiry and the freedom to communicate research
results and ideas without reprisal. In that sense, Plan S actually guarantees a greater
academic freedom than that afforded by the authors of the Letter: open access will mean
that the greatest number of readers will have access to published ideas, rather than
debate being hampered by a paywall. It is highly debatable whether academic freedom
should extend to the freedom of researchers to choose their publication venue: an
author’s freedom to publish wherever they want ends where the reader’s right to freely
access research starts. In actual fact, researchers never enjoy complete freedom of
publication, as papers are often rejected, and subsequently published in a journal that is
not the journal of original choice. Funders, by contrast, have the right to determine how,
or at least under what access terms, the research they fund should be published: he
who pays the piper calls the tune. Nobody is forcing researchers to accept grants from
these Funders if they truly believe their choice of publication venue is being restricted by
them.
In conclusion, the Letter offers plenty of unargued criticism, but no viable alternative to
the currently unsustainable academic publishing landscape. Worse, it fails to grasp the
opportunities offered by Plan S to do so.
Jos Baeten
Martin Paul Eve
Saskia de Vries
Danny Kingsley
Johan Rooryck