The Plan S open access initiative creates more opportunities than threats for Latin America | LSE Latin America and Caribbean

"Recently, concerns have been raised about the consequences that Plan S, an initiative of the cOAlitions S consortium of research funders aiming to provide free online access to all research literature, will have for existing non-commercial and not-for-profit open access initiatives. These concerns focus particularly on the threat to Latin America’s strong tradition of open access publishing. In responding to these concerns, I argue that Plan S has many synergies with this vibrant and exemplary tradition of open access publishing, and this will create real opportunities for future development....

Another synergy between Plan S and Latin American open access publishing lies in the pledge from cOAlition S funders that it is funders and research institutions who will pay for open access publication fees (Principle 4). For funders and research institutions, paying for open access fees is the easiest way to participate in the costs of open access publishing....

The objection against a payment per publication is that in this way Plan S upholds the article-processing charge (APC) system, but this is not quite correct. The most legitimate objection against APCs is that they require authors to find the money to pay for their publications. But Plan S has eliminated this obstacle: the funder or institution pays the publisher, not the author...."