Nine routes towards Plan S compliance – updated

by Jeroen Bosman & Bianca Kramer

Changes in Plan S compliant options as of May 31, 2019

On May 31, cOAlition-S, the group of funders responsible for Plan S, published the updated Plan S principles and implementation guidance, addressing feedback received during the public consultation period.  Based on these details we updated our scheme of nine routes towards compliance.

The information in the principles and guidance document involves some changes and additional details compared to the draft implementation guidance that was made public on November 27, 2018:

• the option for cOAlition-S members to approve the use of the CC BY-ND license for individual articles
• addition of transformative model agreements and transformative journals to the options for transformative arrangements that allow hybrid journals to be compliant
• specification that funders can (but are not obliged to) financially contribute to transformative arrangements, up until 2024
• removal of the requirement for transformative agreements to include a scenario for  subsequent full transformation to OA

Some of these  changes effect the compliant routes available. We hence made adaptations to the scheme and the list of routes. For each of the routes the scheme shows examples (please treat them as such), assessments of effects on various stakeholders and on overall cost and also whether the route aligns with expected changes in the evaluation system.

Other changes in the principles and implementation guidance do not have a direct effect on the possible routes, but do have the potential to  influence their feasibility and effects. These include the postponement of the formal commencement point of Plan S with one year to January 1 2021,  the relaxation of some of the requirements for repositories, requirements for transparency  of costs and prices, the stipulation that funders will only financially support transformative agreements after 1 of January 2021 where they adhere to the ESAC Guidelines and the elevation to the 10 principles of the commitment to revise evaluation criteria.

The routes

In our view it is useful to discern 4 potential gold routes, 1 hybrid route, 1 hybrid/green route and 3 potential green routes.

1. Using existing or new APC-based gold journals / platforms.
2. Using existing or new non-APC-based gold journals / platforms (a.k.a. diamond).
3. Flipping journals to an APC-based gold model, by publishers or by editors taking the journal with them.
4. Flipping journals to non-APC-based gold (diamond), by publishers or editors taking the journal with them.
5. Using a hybrid journal that is part of a transformative (model) agreement with a funder, institution or consortium, or that is a transformative journal. Funders can choose to support this route financially until the end of 2024.
6. Publishing your article open access and CC-BY(-SA) in a non-compliant hybrid journal and self-archiving that article in a compliant repository.
7. Archiving the publisher version, on publication, with copyright retained and an open license.
8. Archiving the accepted author manuscript, on publication, with copyright retained and an open license.
9. Sharing preprints (e.g. in dedicated preprint archives) and using overlay journals for peer review.

Discuss

We hope this is valuable in supporting discussions or that it will at least provoke some comments. For the latter you can either use the comments function below, use Hypothesis or use the Google Slides version of the scheme.

The scheme (click to enlarge)