Reply to Kiley and Smits: Meeting Plan S’s goal of maximizing access to research | PNAS
peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-03-06
Summary:
"Thank you for recognizing the value that scholarly societies bring to the research ecosystem and the scientific enterprise as a whole—and for recognizing the importance of their financial viability (1).
And thank you for clearly stating your goal for Plan S (2). A much simpler route toward achieving your goal of maximizing access to research and allowing for artificial intelligence and text and data mining is Plan U, in which funders require that grantees deposit manuscripts on a preprint server under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) before submission and peer review in a journal.* Plan U avoids the tremendous overhead and infrastructure needed to implement, monitor, and enforce Plan S—which entails vetting thousands of individual journals, various journal platforms, and repositories—and eliminates the need to further refine Plan S implementation guidelines, which have to date raised more questions than they answer.
Plan U would establish a far more uniform policy across a much larger group of researchers, while avoiding the need to cap article processing charges or ban hybrid journals. Such a policy is not only more inclusive, but more likely to achieve global buy-in...."