Researchers complained that the plan would limit their freedom to choose where to publish. There was also intense resistance by publishers and scientific societies that were concerned about losing revenue. Under pressure, the organizers of the plan postponed its implementation from 2020 to 2021 and temporarily suspended a series of restrictions. cOAlition S announced that it would continue allowing for publication in any journal model, even those restricting access to subscribers, provided that the magazine guarantees distribution of one revised copy of the work in an open access repository soon after publication, where it can be consulted with no restrictions.\u00a0 But the flexibility will only benefit journals that mark the so-called \u201ctransformation agreements,\u201d through which they promise to progressively broaden their involvement with open access until reaching 100% of their articles by 2024. In return, they are authorized to maintain the old model for the next four years, thereby receiving money from public agencies to cover the cost of publishing open-access articles.<\/p>\n
While Plan S is getting off the ground, it is not yet clear how much change it will produce. During its launch, significant effort was made to achieve the involvement of agencies from other countries and, therefore, increase the power of negotiation for cOAlition S. But the plan continues to be a European strategy that does not involve other continents. In the labyrinth of options for open-access publishing, it is not known which will be chosen. According to Abel Packer, manager of the open-access magazine collection at SciELO Brasil, the future of Plan S depends a lot on the goals and the extent of the transformation agreements that will be signed. For now, other types of agreements are progressing, signed by publishers and countries or universities that are motivated by Plan S, but not associated with the initiative.<\/p>\n
Such agreements do not establish changes in the models of the journals that work with subscriptions. One of them, negotiated between publisher Wiley and the platform Jisc Collections, will allow the close to 9,000 articles by authors in the United Kingdom who are published annually in Wiley magazines to have open access in 2022. In Sweden, the agreement between the Bibsam Consortium and Elsevier, in effect since January 1st<\/sup>, gives researchers and students access to more than 2,000 journals of the publisher and allows all articles of Swedish authorship to be published via open access. In exceptional cases, there have been significant advances.<\/p>\n To publish with open access, magazines of the Nature<\/em> group propose charging authors a fee of \u20ac9,500 per article<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Publisher Springer Nature announced it has introduced open-access publications. \u201cWe are the world\u2019s largest publisher of open-access articles. This is where scientific enterprise will naturally move,\u201d said James Butcher, vice-president of journals, to the magazine Science<\/em>. Today, the company publishes 600 open-access journals and another 2,200 hybrid models, which charge subscriptions and offer open-access publications to authors who pay a fee. For the group, not participating in the plan would be bad business. In 2017, 35% of published articles in their flagship publication\u2014magazine Nature<\/em>\u2014were supported by a funding agency associated with Plan S.<\/p>\n But the transition from one model to another also reveals one of the initiative\u2019s key weaknesses: the impact the change will have on publication costs. In November, a group of 32 magazines of the Nature<\/em> collection presented a strategy for publishing open-access articles based on a charge of \u20ac9,500 per article\u2014equal to US$11,500 or R$58,000. It would be the highest amount charged in the market for scientific articles.<\/p>\n It would be introduced experimentally as the lowest cost option for open access. Authors who submit articles to the magazines Nature Genetics<\/em>, Nature Methods<\/em> and Nature Physics<\/em> would pay \u20ac4,790 per article if they agree to participate in the so-called \u201cguided revision.\u201d Through this process, if the publishers of the three magazines decide that a manuscript is robust enough to send for revision in pairs, the authors would have to pay an upfront \u201ceditorial assessment fee\u201d of \u20ac2,190 to cover initial costs, without guarantee of publication. If the article is accepted, they would pay an additional fee of \u20ac2,600. If not accepted, the author would still be able to incorporate into their manuscript the revisers\u2019 recommendations. The first draft of Plan S incorporates standardization and a ceiling for the article processing fees (APFs) charged to the authors. The APFs remunerate the publishers, covering editorial and publication costs for the articles, which today range from US$1,500 and US$5,000 per paper. The designers of Plan S have suggested a range of values between US$1,500 and US$3,000 for each APF. In the current version of the plan, it recommends that publishers simply be transparent with respect to their criteria for defining fees.<\/p>\n According to Abel Packer, there are restricted access magazines that would allow for immediate distribution of articles in public repositories\u2014but only if the content were sponsored by a signing agency with Plan S. The other articles would continue to be inaccessible for a waiting period of at least six months. He expects that the competition between magazines will obligate publishers to charge competitive fees. \u201cPerhaps some will reduce the value of their APFs and seek financial stability, increasing the number of articles accepted for publication,\u201d he suggests. \u201cBut the tendency is to widen the gap between researchers of wealthy countries\u2013\u2013who would have access to high impact journals\u2013\u2013and those in poorer countries, or at the beginning of their careers, who would have to find other options,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n The increase in costs was the reason for losing some Plan S supporters. The European Research Council (ERC), a program of the European Union that supports groups of excellence, announced in July that it would stop funding the plan due to dissatisfaction with the fact that researchers early in their careers, and those from countries outside Europe, would lose the option of publishing their work.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>The obstacles of Plan S are mostly attributed to the concerns of funding agencies in various countries regarding upsetting the process for scientific communication by adopting radical changes that disrupt ingrained practices. \u201cThere is considerable agreement that the funding costs for scientific publications should not fall to those who read them, but the method for doing this is still under discussion,\u201d explains Jos\u00e9 Roberto de Fran\u00e7a Arruda, professor with the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Campinas (FEM-UNICAMP) and member of the adjunct panel for Exact Sciences and Engineering at FAPESP. One of the key points of dissension, according to Arruda, involves the definition of how much is reasonable to pay for publishing a paper in an environment where the costs will completely fall to the authors and funding agencies.\u00a0 \u201cImagine a research grant in the amount of R$200,000, which results in five scientific articles per year. If each paper costs US$1,500, this would represent a large part of the project\u2019s overall value,\u201d he confirms. \u201cToday, we recommend that researchers foresee how much they will need to publish the results at the time they present their project.\u201d<\/p>\n