Harvard Library’s Commitment to Open Access | Harvard Library

"In my own view, to achieve this equity and diversity, we need to go beyond article processing charges (APCs) and the aims of transformative agreements. A reliance on APCs excludes authors who cannot find the money to pay them, and that burden falls disproportionately on authors from the global south and from less affluent institutions in the global north. We need to develop truly transformative models that leverage the opportunities of the digital age and fully remove cost barriers: no fees for authors or readers. We need to envision distributed, trusted networks, rather than letting control rest within just a few entities. We need academic control of academic work. We need to invest in reasonable and transparent costs, ideally within an open-source framework, for infrastructure and services that enable the use of that scholarly work.

Plan S gives a nod in the direction of new platforms: “Plan S is NOT just about a publication fee model of Open Access publishing. cOAlition S supports a diversity of sustainability models for Open Access journals and platforms...” Last fall, I appreciated seeing the Plan S feedback provided jointly by Harvard and MIT, including this statement: “We’d like to see Plan S reinforce and expand — rather than neglect or unintentionally hinder — the power of open-access repositories to democratize access to science and scholarship.” Earlier this October, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and cOAlition S issued a joint statement noting that “Repositories offer a low-cost, high-value option for providing Open Access and are also a mechanism for introducing innovation in scholarly communication, acting as vehicles for developing new dissemination models and providing access to a wide range of scholarly content.” ..."