Plan S Consultation Response from the Society Publishers’ Coalition

"We support the principles of open scholarship and believe that open access to research outputs will benefit researchers across our shared communities. We also believe that authors should retain copyright in their works with no restrictions, and that open access publication fees should be paid by funders or institutions, not by individual researchers. Ability to pay should not be linked to ability to publish. We support the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) as a driver to improve research assessment by evaluating the work itself, rather than using the venue of publication as a proxy for quality. We recognise the importance of open archives and repositories, such as preprint servers, for hosting research outputs, which we see as a fee-free complement to open access in journals.

Despite having these principles and ambitions in common with Plan S, we have concerns about the Plan, as it is currently written, and have detailed these below. As a group of societies that publish journals, we share a common aim of transitioning to open access in a sustainable way, and we seek to engage with funders, institutions and consortia to find a way forward within the spirit of the Plan’s principles; to this end, we have also included some suggestions of how cOAlition S can help to ensure that a transition is potentially achievable...."