A report about Plan S’s potential effects on journals marks a busy week for the open-access movement | Science | AAAS

"The report on Plan S, released 1 March, examines several ways in which the proposal could affect and challenge journals. It comes from Clarivate, the analytics firm that tracks journals in its Web of Science database and assigns them journal impact factors. Clarivate examined 3700 journals that in 2017 published at least six articles acknowledging a Plan S funder; of these, 3200 are not in the Directory of Open Access Journals, a comprehensive listing, and so cannot be compliant with Plan S. The Clarivate report describes how Plan S may have a significant effect on authors even in countries whose funders don’t sign on: It identified 40,000 articles published in 2017 that involved collaborations between researchers in a European country and those in the rest of the world. At several U.S. universities—including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena—more than 15% of papers listed Plan S funding. Papers produced with any Plan S funding would be required to publish in a Plan S–compliant journal.... The publisher Springer Nature in London began a pilot project allowing the networking website ResearchGate to post some full-text, freely accessible articles from select Nature-branded journals, including the flagship. The 3-month pilot will upload at least 6000 articles, published after November 2017 in 23 subscription-only journals, to the ResearchGate profiles of the scientists who authored the articles. Berlin-based ResearchGate, which counts 15 million scientists and researchers worldwide as members, has been sued by other publishers for copyright infringement for allowing its users to upload paywalled journal articles to their profiles. In a 1 March news release, Springer Nature said the pilot will gather feedback from scientists and institutions to allow it to develop new models for providing access to articles; in another statement, ResearchGate said it hopes the experiment will increase collaborations among scientists. “This pilot project represents the first significant experiment with the syndication of publisher content to a content supercontinent,” writes Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, a librarian at the University of Illinois in Champaign, on The Scholarly Kitchen blog...."