Jean-Claude, as an analyst I offer the following observations.
1. It is true that Plan S offers an optional compliance method that would
allow authors to publish OA in hybrid journals. In fact it would allow
them to publish in purely subscription journals. It is, as you indicate,
immediate repository deposit in open form with a CC-BY licence. But these
terms are such that most publishers do not presently allow, so it is
something of a phantom option, as it were. Thus there is a de facto ban
on hybrid publishing in most journals.
This green option is probably best regarded as a way publishers might
choose to comply with in the future, instead of flipping their journals.
But I would not claim that it presently exists to such a degree that
hybrids are not banned.
2. The cost disclosure rules would almost certainly keep the US Federal
Government from adopting Plan S. That business accounts are proprietary
is pretty fundamental here.
David
At 05:37 PM 11/17/2018, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:
In response to the criticisms
aimed at Plan S
(
https://sites.google.com/view/plansopenletter/open-letter), the Fair
Open Access Alliance has issued its own answer:
The Open Letter: Reaction of Researchers to Plan S: too far, too
risky.
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 Ãf 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 iis 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.
[
https://www.fairopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Public-statement-TTOA-consortium-30may18-def.pdf
]
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