Plan S: how important is open access publishing? | Times Higher Education (THE)

peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-01-24

Summary:

"Dislike of gold open access is also partly responsible for researchers’ opposition to Plan S. Lynn Kamerlin, professor of structural biology at Uppsala University, is one of the instigators of the open letter against it. While she pledges strong support for open access, she is happy with the current rate of progress and sees the recent “explosion” in the use of preprint servers as illustrative of the range of routes towards it. She fears that the details of Plan S’ “embargo requirements and repository technical requirements…are so draconian that paid-for gold becomes the easiest way to fulfil them”. This will convert the “nudges” towards gold in existing funder mandates (which she supports) into a “shove”, which will be “a disaster for the research community” because it will disadvantage those unable to pay article processing charges and “seriously jeopardise the much more rigorous quality control standards provided by high-quality society journals compared to the high-volume for-profit business model, which has an inbuilt conflict of interest”.

Nor is Kamerlin alone in expressing a concern that the allegedly lower standards of peer review practised by fully open access journals have compromised quality. But, for Suber, debating quality rather misses the point. “Yes, there is some low-quality open access work, but there’s also low-quality subscription journal work, and people who step back [to see the bigger picture] always acknowledge that,” he says. “Quality and access are completely independent of each other. Open access isn’t a kind of peer review, it’s a kind of dissemination.”

However, he agrees with Kamerlin that the “green” form of open access, whereby academics post work that is in subscription journals on their institutional repositories or elsewhere...is another good option...."

Link:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/plan-s-how-important-open-access-publishing

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.plan_s oa.debates oa.growth oa.quality oa.censorship oa.medicine oa.humanities oa.data oa.mining oa.south oa.lay oa.harvard.u oa.elsevier oa.cancellations oa.industry oa.economic_impact oa.benefits oa.uk oa.finch_report oa.green oa.gold oa.preprints oa.embargoes oa.no-fee oa.consultations oa.ecr oa.academic_freedom oa.societies oa.objections oa.repositories oa.versions oa.ssh oa.journals

Date tagged:

01/24/2019, 09:50

Date published:

01/24/2019, 04:50