68% of ‘transformative journals’ to be kicked out of Plan S scheme - Research Professional News

"Coalition S strategy head criticises efforts from American Chemical Society, Elsevier and Springer Nature Just over two-thirds of the ‘transformative journals’ permitted to receive funding from organisations participating in the Plan S open-access initiative are to be kicked out of the scheme for failing to meet their targets. Under Plan S, a group of international funders require papers reporting research they have supported to be made openly available immediately under certain conditions. These include that the funders will only pay for publication in hybrid journals—which combine open-access and subscription options—if those journals have committed to transforming to full open access at a given rate. Coalition S, the participating funder group, announced on 20 June that it would remove 1,589 out of 2,326 journals (68 per cent) from the transformative journals scheme. It said they failed to meet their requirements to increase their share of open-access content by 5 percentage points annually on an absolute basis and 15 per cent annually on a relative basis, and to revoke the subscription option once 75 per cent of articles are made openly available. The scheme, launched in 2020, is designed to encourage the transition of subscription-based scholarly publishing to full and immediate open access...."