Plan S, an initiative by European funders to increase open access to journal articles, has led to progress but not in the way originally intended. Although it aimed to dismantle paywalls and boost fully open-access publishing, most of the growth has occurred in hybrid journals, which mix open-access and paywalled articles.

As I noted a week ago, to my enormous surprise I was invited to be one of the two participants in the plenary debate the closes the annual meeting of my long-term nemesis, the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I was to propose the motion “The open access movement has failed” in ten minutes or less, followed by Jessica Polka’s statement against the motion;

Unlängst erschien der Open-Access-Monitoring-Bericht 2022 der niederländischen Wissenschaftsorganisationen und Forschungsförderer Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) und ZorgOnderzoek Nederland (ZonMW), der für die insgesamt 5.763 in geförderten Projekten entstandenen vorwiegend Zeitschriftenpublikationen eine Open-Access-Quote von 93 % feststellt.

Jeffrey “predatory journals” Beall famously catapulted himself out of any serious debate with an article in the journal TripleC, entitled “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access”. In it, Beall claimed that OA proponents don’t care about access, but that they form an “anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with”. The article is so replete with similarly unhinged fairy

Yesterday, cOAlition S published their updated principles and implementation guidelines for #PlanS, together with the rationale behind the update. This constitutes a very much welcome effort, as evidence of the increasing awareness among funders as to their potential leverage in infrastructure modernization, at a time when institutions have apparently abandoned their faculty completely.

Plan S is an initiative for immediate and full open access to scholarly research publications put forward by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders. In November 2018 specific implementation guidance on the Plan S principles has been released to the public with the aim of gathering feedback from various Plan S stakeholders, including researchers, publishers, funders, and other interested parties.

Since cOAlition S is asking for recommendations from the community for the implementation of their Plan S, I have also chipped in. In their feedback form, they ask two questions, to which I have answered with the replies below.