'Plan S' Aims to Transform Scholarly Communication—Will Publishers Be Ready?

"Estimates suggest that the Plan S signatories account for 3% of global research output, but this figure will vary significantly across publishers. Will Schweitzer, Director of Product and Custom Publishing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) believes that around 5% of their research article output falls within the scope of the Plan as it stands. "I would consider that to be a significant proportion," he adds, "so we want to find a model that works." And as the Coalition is likely to grow over time, the number of authors falling within the scope of Plan S will also increase....

Flipping existing journals, Schweitzer observes, may be an option for some publications. But is much more difficult for journals like Science, where much of the content is not research articles.

Another option could be to split journals into a subscription version and a compliant OA version. There is precedent for this in the American Mathematical Society’s Series B journals and Elsevier’s Water Research X. Of course, any such journal would have to acquire its own journal impact factor, and there is a risk that funders might consider this a hybrid model, which Plan S discourages...."