Enabling Open Access through clarity and transparency: summary of publishers responses | Plan S

"In March 2022, cOAlition S sent a letter to over 100  subscription publishers requesting that, at the point of submitting a manuscript for publication, authors are made aware of:

1]. The licence they will be asked to sign, if their manuscript is accepted for publication;

2]. Any fees which will be levied, if their manuscript is accepted for publication;

3]. Whether their manuscript will be re-routed to another journal as a result of any prior notice of re-use rights, which is included in the submission.

In addition to the individual letters, we also asked a number of publisher trade associations – STM, ALPSP and OASPA – to circulate this request to their members.

cOAlition S provided a form for publishers to provide this information and a request that this information should be supplied no later than the 2nd May 2022.  We agreed that we would make this information available to our funded researchers, to help them make an informed decision as to whether to proceed with their submission or not.

Table 1 below provides an at-a-glance summary of the responses we received, with links to publisher websites where further information about their policies can be found....

what is also striking is that none of the big publishers – Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor& Francis, ACS and many others – replied to our request for clarity.  We will continue to encourage them to make their policies and fees clear to our funded researchers at the point of submission.

To help authors ask for the clarity they need before peer review proceeds, we have created the pre-submission letter template and the submission cover letter template as well as a user guide about when, how and why to use these templates. Authors may wish to use one of these templates when contacting publishers who do not provide clarity prior to the point of submission."