Professor Hinchliffe,

Many thanks for the clarification. I cannot now distinctly recall what led me to associate, synaptically, Plan S with transformative agreements, in relation to the conference. Please forgive the elision if in fact Plan S was not advocated or even discussed publicly at the conference. Perhaps it was a sense that pressures from European models, which have emerged in a much different funding framework, now exert implicit but tremendous pressure to eventuate something in the U.S. much akin to Plan S.

I would ask whether much of the library community in the U.S. agrees with the aims of Plan S. My guess is: for very many librarians, yes. But not being an expert on scholarly publishings, even if it is great fun to follow the trends very imperfectly given a multiplicity of librarian duties, I defer to those far more knowledgeable on all these matters.

Anyhow, it is not clear that the elision does not affect my criticisms of transformative agreements. But perhaps the understanding of the latter phrase is not widely agreed upon and so the criticisms need adapting, mutatis mutandis, according to various definitions or understandings.

My own interest in these initiatives is in how preprints offer a way to address many of the OA movement's goals, in an environment in which there already seems to be so much free back-content available, albeit with embargoes. I was just working on subscription cancellations and was impressed by how much freely accessible back-content there is, and how it (plus already purchased perpetual access to content) can figure in cancellation decisions.

I'm personally happy with low-cost subscription/toll-access pricing for embargoed content, within (once again) a seriously contracted journal space (contraction based on principles of scientific communication, wholly independent of OA concerns) a la something like Bradford's law. 

What is the alternative? Taxpayer funding of APCs via grant funds and via library funding at public institutions, with opportunity costs for use of those funds. The philosophical grounds for using taxpayer funding to address problems in journal-land remain unexplored. Not to mention the longstanding bankrolling by institutions of so many salami-sliced journal articles. The business and economic assumptions that underlie the transformative goals also, imo, remain unexplored, or at least open to debate as to their unintended consequences.

As usual, just my views, not those of my employer.

Brian Simboli

Brian Simboli
Science, Mathematics, and Psychology Librarian
Library and Technology Services
E.W. Fairchild Martindale
Lehigh University
8A East Packer Avenue
Bethlehem, PA 18015-3170