Plan U: funders urged to mandate immediate preprint publication | Times Higher Education (THE)

"Forget Plan S, what about “Plan U”? Scientists have argued that research funders should go one step further than Europe’s open access initiative by mandating that all papers that they finance should be made immediately available on preprint servers.

Writing in Plos Biology on 4 June, three open access advocates say that funders’ move to require research that they support to be made freely available at the point of publication goes only so far towards opening up scientific exchange when journal review and editing processes take so long.

Richard Sever and John Inglis, co-founders of the preprint server BioRxiv, and Mike Eisen, editor in chief of open access publishing platform eLife, make the case for Plan U – for “universal” – under which funders would require academics to post their work on preprint servers first, before peer review....

“Funders could literally mandate this tomorrow,” Dr Sever added, “unlike the alternative solutions proposed, which all require significant structural changes likely to take years.” Plan U could be implemented alongside Plan S, he said...."