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Plan S founder: ‘long way to go’ to achieve initiative’s aims

Image: EU2018BG Bulgarian Presidency, [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

New book by Robert-Jan Smits shares history of open-access initiative—and ponders its future

There is “still a long way to go” before the open-access initiative Plan S achieves its aims, even though it has already “rocked the world of scientific publishing off its feet”, according to its founder.

In a book on Plan S published on 27 January—titled Plan S for Shock—Robert-Jan Smits (pictured) calls for “leadership” from policymakers, funders and scientists to get all publicly funded research openly available immediately, with transparency over the costs of doing so.

“As long as the careers of scientists are determined mainly by where they publish…and as long as scientists are not sufficiently rewarded for their teaching, knowledge transfer to industry, the commercial ideas and startups they create…or the expertise and support they provide to policymakers…the transition to full open access will be hard to complete,” he says.

Smits warns that although Plan S has “rocked the world of scientific publishing off its feet and accelerated the transition to full and immediate open access”, there is “still a long way to go” before that goal is achieved.

Open-access envoy

Under Plan S, a group of mainly European research funders is requiring papers reporting work they have funded to be made openly available immediately and under certain conditions, such as that authors must retain the rights over their work.

The plan was developed in 2018 by Smits, a former European Commission director-general of research and now president of the executive board of Eindhoven University of Technology, in his final year at the EU institution as its open-access envoy.

In the book, co-written with journalist Rachael Pells, Smits describes a “frustrating” meeting with representatives of major academic publishers early in his envoy role, where he was tasked with developing a plan to speed up the transition to open access. “I’d thought, perhaps naively, that there would be a willingness to really work together,” he says, adding that as he listened to the reaction from publishers, he realised his job was “not going to be as easy as I’d hoped”.

Elsewhere in the book, Robert Kiley, head of strategy for Plan S and a former head of open research at the Wellcome Trust—which is among the funders implementing Plan S—says that academics “don’t need journals” any more now that they have the internet.

Kiley says that academia should move entirely to the model being pioneered by funders and institutions including Wellcome and the EU: publication on online platforms of preprints ahead of peer review, followed by open peer review and rounds of improvements.