Funders behind the policy tweak rules after major consultation.
A major push by some science agencies to make the research they fund open-access on publication — Plan S — has been delayed by a year. Funders now don’t have to start implementing the initiative until 2021, the agencies announced today, to give researchers and publishers more time to adapt to the changes the bold plan requires.
The funders, together called Coalition S, say they are also now prepared to give publishers more flexibility in how they transform paywalled or part-paywalled journals into fully open-access titles to become compliant with Plan S, and they will not necessarily place a cap on journals’ open-access publishing fees as they’d previously stated. The group of 19 mainly European funders behind the plan made the changes after a public consultation drew hundreds of responses from publishers, academic libraries and researchers (see ‘Five key changes to Plan S’).
“2020 was considered to be too ambitious by the research community and publishers genuinely wishing to change,” says Marc Schiltz, president of Science Europe, a Brussels-based advocacy group that represents European research agencies and officially launched the policy last year.
