Why Programming Historian is not fully implementing Plan-S Recommendations | Programming Historian

flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks 2020-06-30

Summary:

Programming Historian has been fully Open Access since day one. For a decade now our team has been publishing academic content and making it freely and widely available online to more than 1-million people per year. In that time, we’ve never charged an author, reader, or a library a penny for accessing our material.

We therefore welcomed the arrival of ‘Plan-S’, an open access initiative in scholarly publishing that encourages new standards across the sector. As practicing academics, we look forward to a day when knowledge is more widely available to those who can benefit from it. We’re happy to report that we already meet most of the suggested requirements, including open licenses for published content, DOIs for all articles, high quality metadata, and transparent costing (free in our case). But as a not-for-profit open access scholarly publisher built on the backs of thousands of hours of passion and voluntary effort, we can’t, and we won’t implement the entire set of recommendations made by Plan S, in their current form (mid 2020).

This is because our business model does not rely upon article processing charges (APCs), extensive subscription fees from a scholarly society, or a home within an academic library who pays all of the bills. We’re a group of scholars who believe in what we are doing. So we put our own time (and in some cases, money) into making that happen. We have a small budget generously gleaned from members of our community who have decided to financially back us, as well as some wonderful library partners who provide cash or in-kind support.

However, our budget remains extremely tight, and we owe it to our supporters to make sure every penny goes where it’s needed most. We are therefore extremely dismayed that so many of the ‘Plan S’ recommendations or requirements cost money, without obviously adding value to our publications or our core mission of sharing knowledge openly and for free.

We have therefore decided as a team, NOT to implement the following Plan-S requirements without direct on going financial support to do so:

[...]

Link:

https://programminghistorian.org/posts/plan-s

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.plan_s oa.academic_led oa.journals oa.publishing oa.nonprofit

Date tagged:

06/30/2020, 10:01

Date published:

06/30/2020, 06:01