On 30th November MyScienceWork organized a webinar to take stock of the journey since the launch of Plan S. The webinar focused on the evolution of publisher policies, open access (OA) business models, and the challenges and opportunities related to these topics. This post provides a recap of the webinar, particularly the conversation among Ashley Farley (Head of Open Access Policy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), Nick Campbell, Ph.D. (Vice President of Academic Affairs at Springer Nature), and Johan Rooryck (Executive Director of cOAlition S). The webinar was moderated by Sally Ekanayaka of MyScienceWork, who is also the author of this post.
If there ever was a topic that stirred the scholarly publishing pot, it would be Plan S.
Much has been said, both critical and supportive, from its impact on society publishers to why the rights retention strategy probably won’t work. So, in an effort to ask, “Hey! Is Plan S, the next tipping point in scholarly communications, here for the long haul?” I put together a webinar for authors, publishers, libraries, and everyone in between to discuss Plan S and the movement towards open access (OA) publishing.
This interesting Scholarly Kitchen piece looks at the nuts and bolts of Plan S, the implications of open access and its possible future. If the exclusion of researchers from less affluent countries can be resolved it has phenomenal potential to democratise academic publishing and shift resources away from exorbitant subscription fees perhaps toward constructive items. We have included links to 11 related items.
I framed the webinar this way in part because it is important for contributors and other research stakeholders to understand that OA publishing is not (only) a box-checking component to please funders or politicians, but is in fact an important readjustment of academic publishing and knowledge sharing processes. I wondered how much there’s to be discussed (and learned) that hasn’t already been explored. The answer turned out to be “a lot.”
Nick Campbell, Vice President for Academic Affairs at Springer Nature, began his remarks with the assertion that “The benefits that Open Science are going to deliver are huge for both research and for broader society.” While presenting his overview of the role of Open Access in a changing publishing paradigm, he went on to say that, “It can make a huge difference just making that transition. If you think about scholarly communication, it accounts for perhaps 1% of all expenditure on research, but it’s a really important 1%. By moving to models where we get rid of paywalls around research articles, we can improve on the return on investment of the rest of the 99%, by helping improve reproducibility and ensuring faster innovation, and we’ve really seen that play out in real time during the Covid pandemic.”
