What does the Web of Science tell us about Plan S? | Research Information

"Only 120,000 (6.4 per cent) of papers indexed in the Web of Science acknowledge Plan S funders, but these are comparatively well-cited, published in high impact journals and as we have seen, often in journals from major publishing houses. They won’t just influence the publishing landscape – these are papers that will change their fields of scientific discovery. 

Post-Plan S, we would expect to see about 90,000 papers that are published in journals that are not compliant with Plan S move to Gold OA journals, which increase the number of papers in Gold OA journals by 29 per cent and, on the flipside, decrease the number of non-open access papers and Hybrid Open Access papers by 5 per cent and 23 per cent respectively. 

Unless there is confirmation from Plan S on whether ‘read and publish’ deals – such as Wiley’s recent agreement with Projekt DEAL – will be considered compliant in the long term, the market can be expected to change in response by ‘flipping’ existing hybrid journals to become fully OA, or Plan S papers being redirected to compliant Gold OA journals. There are only a few hybrid journals with a medium-to-high percentage of open access content that might easily flip, which implies that challenging business decisions lie ahead for publishers. ..."