The Impacts of Plan S - part 1

Author: Tony Roche, Emerald’s Chief Officer: Publishing & Strategic Relationships

Despite the progress of recent years, there’s no denying open access (OA) remains a sector challenge, and one that publishers continue to wrestle with.

The environment is complex and currently there’s no single model that provides sustainable open access in a way that is equitable for all stakeholders.

At Emerald Publishing OA remains high on our agenda. In recent years we’ve experimented with different publishing models while keeping top of mind our overall purpose:

To publish research that has realworld impact by creating an equitable research and publishing environment where all voices are represented and heard.

Since Emerald introduced its zero embargo green open access policy back in 2014, we’ve been following the various funder mandates, policy maker interventions and new models as they’ve developed. One of these is Plan S, an initiative for OA publishing which launched in 2018, supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations.

A primary objective being that "…all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo."

The model has subsequently resulted in challenges and widely acknowledged unintended impacts, as Tony Roche, Emerald’s Chief Officer: Publishing & Strategic Relationships, explains.

The main impact of Plan S has been the acceleration of gold OA output in some STEM disciplines. While this is a good thing, it has come at the expense of global author equity and participation in research publishing. It has accelerated publishing sector consolidation, with many society publishers, other not-for-profits, small and medium-sized commercial publishers struggling due to lack of scale in terms of published output and operational efficiencies afforded by size of publishing programme.

Several gold open access sector entrants have struggled to marry up the core publishing role of peer review facilitator with the volume-based operating model of gold open access, further exacerbating the research integrity challenges embodied by the proliferation of paper mills in recent years. This impacts the whole research and publishing ecosystem, setting back rather than taking forward the OA agenda.

The schedule (until the end of 2024 on the basis of transformative agreements), and the model itself, were in our view unrealistic in terms of a global flip from ‘pay to read’ to ‘pay to publish’. This has been borne out in the low percentage of content, journals and subject domains that have managed to fully ‘flip’ to open access.

The rate of flipping has been poor because fundamentally, the model is top-down funder/policy-maker led, rather than researcher/author led. Academic freedom remains a core tenet of research, and authors must retain the choice in terms of where they decide to publish, without condition. In Emerald’s case, we have Read and Publish agreements in place with a number of library customers, intended to ensure that OA publishing is utilised by faculty. However, no Emerald journals are anywhere near approaching the 75% flip threshold set out in Plan S.

Academic freedom remains a core tenet of research, and authors must retain the choice in terms of where they decide to publish, without condition.    

Honing in on the impact on smaller publishers, the Plan S model has made it harder for smaller publishers and society presses to remain viable, which in turn results in further market consolidation. Negotiating capacity, workflow capability, subject domain, and size of publisher journal portfolio all play into this situation, which continues to favour the largest, multi-subject and STEM domain publishers. In parallel, several of the ‘Born Open’ gold open access publishing providers have grown rapidly only to be beset by research integrity and trust issues that feed off of the volume-based model.

Noting all of the above, we welcome the opportunity to explore new models that move beyond article-based charges, as part of a diverse research and scholarly communications sector where all participants, including libraries, publishers and researchers themselves, can fully participate alongside funders and policy makers. However, to do this, all stakeholders must be willing to engage in genuinely open dialogue, to work on a solution together, and this must include responsible publishers of all types, whether not-for-profit, for profit, fully OA or those that offer a variety of models to their author communities.