What Plan S Means for You - Delta Think

"Our previous post looked at how additional funders joining Plan S might affect the overall market. Modelling the big picture is vital to producing benchmarks against which an organization can judge its own position relative to others.

However, your organization’s experience may be different to the average. It will have its own mix of products and dependencies. So, how might we tailor a model to reflect an organization’s specific experience and see how it might differ to the market average?

Our models combine a large number of criteria, including overall growth, the balance between different business models, regional effects, and pricing changes for both volume and value. We also project these criteria over time using regression (or “best fit”) analysis. In doing so, we can choose whether to take conservative or aggressive approaches for projections.

With so many possibilities, developing a model for a specific organization requires choosing which parameters to vary. We must also decide which scenarios to model....

[W]e decided to model two scenarios:

1. The effects of a ban on hybrid, as Plan S funders will not fund APCs in hybrid journals (the green line). We assumed a “worst case” in which hybrid revenue will disappear – authors will either submit to other publishers’ journals, or follow a green option. As a point of comparison, we show a market-average scenario of the EU banning hybrid in the dotted grey line. Note how our fictitious organization suffers LESS reduction in its income even though its hybrid income is GREATER than average. This is because its growth dynamics are influenced by its faster than average revenue and publication growth, and higher-than average proportion of non-EU submissions.
2. China moves forward on its plans to increase OA adoption, making an aggressive move to raise OA uptake to levels similar to that in Plan S countries (i.e. those with strong OA policies). In this scenario, we also assume that subscription revenues per article are replaced by lower open access revenues (playing to the principles of cost-neutrality discussed at the OA conference, and assuming aggressive pricing negotiations took hold). Here we see the organization seeing a much more profound decrease in projected revenues compared with an EU-only Plan S adoption. The dynamic here is one of core, higher-value subscription revenues being eroded by the widespread adoption of open access. ..."