Plan S: Impact on Society Publishers - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Last week cOAlition S released guidance on how they anticipate their open access (OA) mandate, Plan S to be implemented. While this implementation guidance provides many new details about the plan, it has not provided reassurance to anxious society publishers. The stated (and laudable) aim of Plan S is to achieve “full and immediate Open Access to publications from publicly funded research,” but the prohibition against publishing in hybrid journals is not needed to accomplish that aim. Any funder that wishes to can simply stipulate publication in gold (or platinum) OA or hybrid journals and the goal of full and immediate OA would be met. The primary objective of Plan S appears instead to be to achieve a “definitive shift towards new models of academic publishing.” To shift towards something means to shift away from something else. In this case the shift consists (as James Phimister has noted) of attempting to eliminate the commercial viability of subscription journal publishing (the prohibition against hybrid journals makes no sense in any other context). It is also clear that the cOAlition S vision of the future of scientific and scholarly publishing is at odds with the values and practices of most society publishers...."