Guest Post: Plan S Version 2 and the Cost of Quality - The Scholarly Kitchen

There is an inherent economic tension in OA based on author payments, as selectivity either reduces income or concentrates costs on the subset of published authors. The high article processing charges (APCs) of selective journals have to be, with some notable exceptions, diverted from research funding and risk excluding authors from their first-choice journals. Submission fees are theoretically a means to distribute costs equitably, but tend to be discounted as a viable financial model. Models relying exclusively on author payments have other shortcomings: commentaries, review and journalistic articles are not financeable through APCs. Plan S representatives have actually acknowledged that, stating that a journal may sell such content through a site license under Plan S. More importantly, there is no concrete financial support by Plan S for Open Science platforms (including preprints and databases), crucial infrastructure and quality control mechanisms (e.g., ORCID, CrossRef, PubPeer), which are currently at least partially supported by journal fees.