Repository association will help ensure compliance with the radical open-access publishing initiative
The Confederation of Open Access Repositories, an international association with more than 140 members in 35 countries on five continents, has announced plans to help ensure that institutional repositories for academic papers are compatible with the open-access publishing initiative Plan S.
Under Plan S, participating funders will require the researchers they support to make their papers openly available immediately and with permissive licences, for example by publishing them in open-access repositories. Use of repositories—online platforms that lack some features of traditional academic journals—is “strongly encouraged”, regardless of whether papers are also published in a journal.
In a statement on 7 October, Coar said it would look at popular repositories to see if they were able to support the requirements of Plan S. It will identify challenges and provide expertise to help with compliance. Requirements include use of metadata standards, machine-readable licensing information and minimum 99.7 per cent uptime availability.
Coar also said it would gather feedback from repositories on barriers to implementation, and work with Plan S funders on a roadmap to strengthen the role of repositories in supporting open access and open science more broadly.
The announcement came as a study commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, a group of national research infrastructure organisations, reported that the use of preprint servers in scholarly publishing was expected to continue to grow, albeit in some fields faster than others. Preprint servers are a kind of specialised repository for papers that have not yet been peer reviewed.
The report, written by Andrea Chiarelli, Rob Johnson and Emma Richens of the company Research Consulting and Stephen Pinfield of the University of Sheffield, both located in the UK, was based on interviews with researchers. It identified more than 60 platforms for publishing preprints, many of which were started and maintained by researchers themselves.
Speed of publishing remains a primary motive behind the use of preprints, the study found, while fears of later rejection by journals and worries over a lack of peer review remain barriers. Most communities use preprints to gather feedback prior to publication, but some view them as an alternative to conventional publishing.
Some researchers post preprints both on dedicated servers and in more generic repositories, the study found. It suggested that this duplication of infrastructure use could raise funding challenges, and warned that use of preprints also remained largely disconnected from publishers’ workflows.
Chiarelli and his co-authors said it was unclear whether use of preprints would retreat back to the fields where they were first championed, such as economics and high-energy physics, or keep growing to become the default form of publication. Use of preprints is “strongly encouraged” by Plan S but is not sufficient for compliance, which requires immediate open access to a peer-reviewed version of a paper.
Future efforts to encourage publication of preprints should focus on coordinating the work of research institutions, funders and publishers, the report suggested.