American Publishers Join Chorus of Criticism of Europe’s Plan S

As Publishing Perspectives reported from the Frankfurter Buchmesse last month, Plan S is an open access plan announced in early September by the European Research Council.
As we wrote on October 12 in our Frankfurter Buchmesse Show Daily, the plan was created by about a dozen of the leading funders of research in Europe responsible for €7.6 billion (US$8.6 billion). It says that all papers that are the product of research funded by them be free to read as soon as possible.
“No science should be locked behind paywalls,” is the declaration in the preamble to the plan.
The S is said to stand for “science, speed, solution, and shock,” that last s-word referring for many in publishing to the January 1, 2020, deadline by which the plan is meant to be implemented.
The initiative still lacks detail, but it’s clear that it’s meant to stamp out hybrid open access business models which will be declared “non-compliant.” Hybrid models of publishing typically make papers immediately free to read if a scientist wishes, but keep most studies behind paywalls.
An open letter appeared last week, signed by a large group of international researchers—1,039 at this writing—all of whom have misgivings about the approach.
Calling Plan S “a serious violation of academic freedom,” the researchers write, “Plan S, as currently presented by the EU (and several national funding agencies) goes too far, is unfair for the scientists involved and is too risky for science in general. Plan S has far-reaching consequences, takes insufficient care of the desires and wishes of the individual scientists, and creates a range of unworkable and undesirable situations.”
Among those “unworkable and undesirable situations” the letter lists:

• “The complete ban on hybrid (society) journals of high quality is a big problem, especially for chemistry.
• “We expect that a large part of the world will not (fully) tie in with Plan S.
• “With its strong focus on the ‘gold open access’ publication model, in which researchers pay high APCs for each publication, the total costs of scholarly dissemination will likely rise instead of reduce under Plan S.
• “Plan S ignores the existence of large differences between different research fields.”

And on Thursday (November 8), the Association of American Publishers (AAP) issued its own statement about Plan S, prompted by the objections of the signatories to the researchers’ letter. In a prepared statement, AAP president and CEO Maria A. Pallante is quoted, saying:

“It is the strong view of the US publishing industry that Plan S is ill-conceived and unsustainable.
“Plan S is a violation of academic freedom to publish and is a disservice to all who rely on credible research literature.
“Plan S devalues and disrespects the publishing industry threefold: it imposes strict regulations on an innovative private sector marketplace; it creates market access barriers for American publishers; and it places unreasonable constraints on individual researchers.” ... [mehr] https://publishingperspectives.com/2018/11/american-publishers-address-concerns-about-plan-s/