Rice: KD is undermining Plan S

[KD = Kunnskapsdepartementets = Ministry of Education and Research.]

"One criticism of Plan S is that there aren’t enough good open access journals to publish in. Traditional journals have spent years building strong reputations. The prestige researchers acquire when their work is published in these journals is massively reinforced by the career system we have built – in hiring decisions, grant awarding processes, performance reviews and so on. Open access journals are so new that they haven’t yet achieved the same level of visibility. Why should we be forced to sacrifice these benefits for a political agenda?

In Norway, we have an official registration system for research publications, a key element of which is the classification of journals as either Level 1 (intended to cover about 80% of publications by Norwegian researchers) or Level 2 (intended to cover the best 20%). Some critiques of Plan S claim that the government is speaking out of both sides of its mouth, since we have economic incentives to publish in Level 2 journals at the same time as we soon can publish only in Open Access journals, almost none of which are at Level 2...."