Eight routes towards Plan S compliance

by Jeroen Bosman & Bianca Kramer

[also see the update of this post (‘Nine routes towards Plan S compliance‘), published after the Plan S implementation guidance became available]  

Plan S

Much has already been said and written about Plan S, the initiative of a group of European research funders to drastically increase and speed up the transition to full open access. Instead of adding to that with statements on whether it is a good idea or on which elements we like and which we do not like, here we present and dissect eight possible routes towards compliance. For each of those 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.

The routes

In our view it is useful to discern 5 potential gold routes 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. ‘Soft-flipping’ journals to APC gold (leaving subscription/hybrid intact): this means creating a APC-based full OA sister journal with same scope, editors, policies etc..
5. Flipping journals to non-APC-based gold (diamond), by publishers or editors.
6. Archiving the publisher version, on publication, with copyright retained and an open license.
7. Archiving the accepted author manuscript, on publication, with copyright retained and an open license.
8. 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