COAR Response to Plan S

"The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) welcomes the strong stance taken towards open access by a coalition of 11 European Funders, coordinated by Science Europe as outlined in “Plan S” and we strongly support the goal of accelerating the transition to open access....

Plan S commits funders to “the establishment of robust criteria and requirements for the services that compliant high quality Open Access journals and Open Access platforms must provide”. The terms ‘journal’, ‘platform’, ‘archive’ and ‘repository’ are becoming increasingly blurred as functionalities and services evolve and innovate. In a digital, networked environment, the different functionalities of publishing can be unbundled and undertaken in a distributed manner. Therefore, we recommend that any criteria for services be defined according to function (e.g. peer review), rather than type of infrastructure (e.g. journal or platform).... 

While repositories are referenced in Plan S, it is mainly for their preservation role. This overlooks the main role of the global network of over 3000 repositories around the world, which is to provide Open Access to research articles and other valuable outputs....

As an international association, COAR seeks to ensure that the transition towards open access is responsive to the needs and priorities of all regions and countries. Many in the international community are concerned about the negative impact of APCs, especially on less economically developed countries, which have limited budgets (or no funds at all) to support publication fees. A large-scale shift to the APC model would create new barriers for participation in the system for many regions and researchers. In 2017, the major research funders in Latin America asserted that they are not in favour of an APC-based model and that open access “through the payment of APC fees, is impossible to undertake from a financial point of view for the participant countries”....We therefore urge Science Europe to promote a variety of models that will ensure the development of an inclusive system for scholarly communication...."