By making research available to anyone who needs it, open access (OA) publishing removes reading restrictions, allowing wider knowledge dissemination and more options for reuse, giving researchers further opportunities to improve the visibility of their work and build a strong reputation.
In 2018 a coalition of research funders referred to as cOAlition S, including UKRI and Wellcome Trust, expressed their commitment to Plan S. This sets out 10 principles that the plan’s architects hope will ensure that ‘with effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from funded research, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo’.
Informed by our roles as a learned society publisher and as a voice for the chemical sciences community, and drawing on evidence from our activities to amplify the voice of researchers, we developed a position statement on Plan S.
We support many of the principles outlined in Plan S, but believe that it needs to be implemented in a way that is coordinated, ensures dissemination options that satisfy researchers’ needs without adding additional burden on their time and promotes real transition to full open access.
Amplifying the voice of researchers
Open access is the subject of intense international debate. The loudest voices in the debate are often open access campaigners, librarians and information professionals, and funders who want to see the research they support made as widely available as possible.
We believe the voice of researchers is under-represented in this debate, and is also hugely diverse – different disciplines, career stages and countries all see different advantages and disadvantages in a fully open publishing system.
To make sure researchers have an influential voice in this debate, we decided to inform the community about open access and initiatives, and promote their views as part of the international debate.
An international research report into chemical scientists’ attitudes towards open access
A live broadcast panel discussion with researchers, discussing the potential impacts of open access and Plan S on researchers’ work and careers
After watching an animation imagining a conversation between researchers about Plan S, we asked researchers to tell us briefly how it made them feel