Nine routes towards Plan S compliance

by Jeroen Bosman & Bianca Kramer

NB Please note there is a separate, updated post based on the Plan S implementation document of May 2019

Changes in Plan S compliant options as of November 27, 2018

On October 22 we posted Eight routes towards Plan S compliance. Meanwhile, cOAlition-S, the group of funders responsible for Plan S, has put out a guidance document detailing  implementation of the plan. Based on those details we updated our scheme of routes to achieve compliance.

The information in the guidance document involves some changes and additional details compared to what was made public on September 4:

• compliance of self archived (green) publications, with a few strict requirements (it has to be immediate, with copyright retained and with a CC-BY, CC-BY-SA or CC0 license)
• compliance of hybrid journals if they are part of a transformative deal with maximum length of 3 years.
• publications in mirror / sister type journals are not compliant
• no cap (yet) on APC-levels

These and some other, smaller changes effect the compliant routes available. We have hence adapted 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.

The routes

In our view it is useful to discern 4 potential gold routes, 1 (temporary) 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 agreement with a funder or institution. This is a temporary option (until the end of 2024).
6. Publishing your article open access and CC-BY 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