Plan S coalition seeks friends across the pond

The European Commission’s open-access envoy Robert-Jan Smits has been on a whirlwind tour of Washington, DC, in the United States in a bid to gain international backing for his Plan S initiative.

“The 12 [national] funding agencies involved in Plan S have crossed the ocean to raise support in Washington for their ambition to have full and immediate open access by 2020,” Smits told Research Europe. “What began with an invitation from the American Library Association turned out to be a full programme involving meetings with the key US agencies, learned societies and policymakers.”

Under the plan, launched in September, a group of funders will demand that the academics they support make any resulting research papers openly available immediately from 2020 onwards. Researchers will retain copyright over their papers, publishing fees will be capped and publication in journals that mix subscription and open-access publishing models will be phased out.