[GOAL] OA2020 Mainland China Signatory Libraries responded to Plan S Guidance on Implementation

"The followings are the discussed response to Plan S Guidance on Implementation.

01 We are in broad support of Plan S and its goals to ensure immediate and complete open access to journal articles resulting from publicly funded research to the world. We applaud the effort of Plan S to provide strong incentives to make research open access. We support an international effort to achieve this goal worldwide as soon as possible.

02 We fully recognize that the need for forceful and accountable policies by public funders in research, education, and libraries, to facilitate open access against various entrenched interests or the inertia of the status quo. We urge all in research, education, publishing, platforms, repositories, and libraries to engage diligently in transformative efforts abreast with time to meet the challenges.

03 We support the Final Conference Statement of the 14th Berlin Conference on Open Access with its commitments. We urge all the publishers to work with the global research community to effect complete and immediate open access according to the Statement.

04 We support the principles and roadmaps of OA2020 Initiative which aims to transform a majority of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to OA publishing, while continues to support new forms of OA publishing. We believe the transition process can be realized within the framework of currently available resources. We see no legitimate reasons for, and will object to, any attempts to increase spending from the original subscribing institutions in the transformation.

05 We support that authors retain copyrights of their publications in open access publishing through journals or open access platforms.

06 We support that open access publications are made under open licenses. We support the use of the CC_BY license as the preferred one but recommend that other CC licenses also be allowed as compliant to Plan S.

07 We recognize the strong need for compliant requirements, agreed by the research communities, for open access journals and platforms. We agree that infrastructural instruments like DOAJ and OpenDOAR can be utilized to help identifying and signaling compliance, but we urge that cOAlition S and other funders recognize and support other appropriate mechanisms for the purpose and require any such instruments are put under international oversight by the global research community to ensure their no-for-profit nature, inclusiveness, objectiveness, integrity, and efficiency.

08 We commend the recognition by Plan S that there exist different models of financing and paying for Open Access publication. We support an inclusive range of immediate open access publishing approaches. We support the transparency and monitoring of open access publication costs and fees.

09 We urge that cOAlition S and other funders, through Plan S or other means, provide financial support for no-fee OA journals. The wide range of support approaches to no-fee OA journals should be encouraged to enhance the diversity of open access publishing and competiveness of publishing market, and to avoid the perverse effect of giving no-fee journals an incentive to start charging fees. While the support can start with general term statements, measures can be timely designed and tested to encourage quality, integrity, transparency and openness, and increasing host investment and other diverse and appropriate income.

10 We support that where article processing charges (APCs) apply, efforts are made to establish a fair and reasonable APC level, including equitable waiver policies, that reflects the costs involved in the quality assurance, editing, and publishing process and how that adds value to the publication. We hold it very important that any such effort should take into consideration of the diversity in the world to ensure applicability and affordability of any such measures across countries and disciplines.

11 We commend the support and requirements of Plan S for financing APCs for open access publication in subscription journals (‘hybrid Open Access’) only under transformative agreements. These agreements should be temporary and transitional, with a shift to full open access within a very few years.

12 We understand the purposes and the benefits of using ORCIDs in journal publications. Considering different paces of adopting ORCID in different regions and disciplines, we recommend that it is implemented as a preferred condition, at least in the short beginning years. We recommend the same treatment for using DOI.

13 We support the Plan S recommendation that “all publications and also other research outputs deposited in open repositories.” We recommend that Plan S make full acknowledge and use of the full range of capabilities of open repositories to support open access, long-term preservation, research management, and re-use.

14 We encourage that Plan S takes the transformative green OA mechanism as one of venues to implement open access, as long as the embargo period of com