Mr Smits goes to Washington: Architect of bold European open-access plan hopes to garner US support

"A month after European funders launched the ‘Plan S’ initiative to demand immediate open access to scientific literature in the next two years, the plan’s creators have revealed more details about their bold scheme — and are hurriedly trying to get support from US policymakers....

Smits is in the United States this week to talk to research funders, scientific societies and representatives of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. “I’m going for business, not chit-chat,” he told Nature....

In mid-September, Smits suggested at the conference of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in Vienna that if an author published work behind a paywall but immediately deposited an accepted version of the manuscript in an open repository, under a liberal publishing licence, they would be adhering to Plan S.

That clarification might mean that many paywalled journals could find a way to respect Plan S without changing their publishing models. ...

Smits declined to answer Nature’s questions about whether researchers archiving preprints would be sufficient, saying that this would all be laid out by Røttingen and Sweeney’s task force...."