Open-access reformers launch next bold publishing plan
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03342-6
NEWS FEATURE
31 October 2023
Open-access reformers launch next bold publishing plan
The group behind Plan S has already accelerated the open-access movement. Now it is proposing a more radical revolution for science publishing.
Layal Liverpool
The group behind the radical open-access initiative Plan S has announced its next big plan to shake up research publishing and this one could be bolder than the first. It wants all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports to be published openly from the outset, without authors paying any fees, and for authors, rather than publishers, to decide when and where to first publish their work.
The group of influential funding agencies, called cOAlition S, has over the past five years already caused upheaval in the scholarly publishing world by pressuring more journals to allow immediate open-access publishing. Its new proposal, prepared by a working group of publishing specialists and released on 31 October, puts forward an even broader transformation in the dissemination of research.
It outlines a future community-based and scholar-led open-research communication system (see go.nature.com/45zyjh) in which publishers are no longer gatekeepers that reject submitted work or determine first publication dates. Instead, authors would decide when and where to publish the initial accounts of their findings, both before and after peer review. Publishers would become service providers, paid to conduct processes such as copy-editing, typesetting and handling manuscript submissions.
We want this entire system to be in the hands of the research community, or at least controlled by the research community, says Johan Rooryck, executive director of cOAlition S and a linguist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. The coalition defines scholar-led communication as publishing initiatives in which all content-related elements, such as primary-research articles, peer-review reports, editorial decisions and scientific correspondence, are controlled by, and responsive to, the scholarly community.
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