Plan S will bring many changes, but the death of the repository should not be one | Jisc scholarly communications

"On the eve of Open Access Week, Bill Hubbard argues that we must not forget university repositories as the bedrock of open research....

Science Europe’s Plan S has been viewed as a somewhat revolutionary move after years of frustration at the rate of progress in open access. At Jisc, our response to the announcement was a positive one – we need to remove hurdles for the research community and engage the public in the groundbreaking, publicly funded work that takes place at our universities.

We are particularly pleased that the national research funding organisations signing up to Plan S have focused on establishing robust criteria for high-quality OA journals and platforms, support for OA infrastructure and monitoring compliance. These have been areas of Jisc’s work for some time.

We should note that a vital part of the infrastructure is in place. The global repository network, which has been painstakingly built over the past 15 years, has become a staggeringly bountiful source of freely available research.

The discovery service Core shows more than 11 million full-text articles from repositories and elsewhere. Plan S will give these a dramatic boost...."