Earma 2021: Plan S issues warning despite “legal assurances” around its rights-retention strategy
Academics supported by funders participating in the Plan S open-access initiative should be “careful” not to sign agreements with publishers that contradict their prior agreements with their funder, the annual conference of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators has heard.
“Authors should be very well aware of what they are signing when talking to a publisher if they work under a Coalition S mandate,” Plan S executive director Johan Rooryck said in the Earma session on 20 April, referring to mandates from the funders signed up to the initiative. “This is really a call to be careful.”
Under Plan S, funders require the researchers they support to make resulting papers openly available immediately. Authors must also retain rights over the version of their paper accepted for publication by a journal, so that it can be published immediately in a repository—in particular if the version of record of the paper is published behind a paywall in a subscription journal.
But earlier this month, Springer Nature said authors wanting to publish with the company via the subscription route “will be required to sign our licences which allow the accepted manuscript to be shared only after an embargo period”.
It was moves from publishers such as this that prompted Rooryck to issue his warning at the Earma conference, where he repeated previous assertions from Plan S representatives that the initiative’s rights-retention strategy would trump any agreements that authors subsequently enter into with publishers.
“Every later copyright agreement that tries to override elements of that prior [agreement with funders] will be null and void—that we are pretty sure about,” Rooryck said.
He added that although there was no case law yet to set precedent, lawyers had given Plan S funders assurances that their prior agreements would withstand legal challenges. He said that, according to lawyers, publishers could even be found liable if they encourage authors to sign contradictory agreements.
“Some lawyers we’ve consulted have gone so far as to say publishers would be at risk of being found guilty of enticing authors to break their grant agreements, which of course is not allowed, since they knew about the earlier agreement that the author has with the funder,” said Rooryck.
He added that publishers acting in good faith should “not be asking authors to sign a contract that is in blatant contradiction with their earlier engagements”.
Nevertheless, Rooryck stressed that Plan S funders hoped to resolve the issue without resorting to legal challenges, saying: “We would like to avoid that at all cost.”
‘Misleading guidance’
On the same day, Coalition S leaders and heads of researcher groups, including the Global Young Academy, the Young Academy of Europe and the Association of European Research Libraries, accused publishers of issuing “confusing and misleading guidance to authors” around the options and rights available to them.
“Some publishers indicate that they do not ‘support’ rights retention and claim that embargo periods will apply,” they wrote. “In reality, Coalition S-funded researchers do not need the publisher’s permission to immediately share their [author accepted manuscript] zero embargo with a CCBY license, as long as the publisher has been given notice.”
Research Professional News is the official media partner for Earma 2021. Follow more of our coverage on Twitter @ResProfNews and @ResearchEurope, #EARMADigital.
A version of this article also appeared in research Europe