Publishers and funders at odds over ‘green’ open-access model

Funders and others push back against complaints about article repositories from nine publishers

Representatives of the funders behind the Plan S open-access initiative, and various commentators, have rejected a claim from nine academic publishers that one of the initiative’s policies risks “undermining progress” toward full open access to research papers.

Under Plan S, Coalition S funders will require researchers they have supported to make resulting papers openly available immediately in certain ways from 2021. Ideally the ‘version of record’ of the paper will be made available, which generally occurs via a publisher, but the initiative will also accept versions of papers accepted for publication by publishers being made available through repositories—the ‘green’ model of open access.