Plan S: EU To Make Scientific Journal Access Open for All

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Research funders from France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and eight other European nations have unveiled a radical open-access initiative that could change the face of science publishing in two years — and which has instantly provoked protest from publishers.
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As written, Plan S would bar researchers from publishing in 85% of journals, including influential titles such as Nature and Science. According to a December 2017 analysis, only around 15% of journals publish work immediately as open access (see ‘Publishing models’) — financed by charging per-article fees to authors or their funders, negotiating general open-publishing contracts with funders, or through other means. More than one-third of journals still publish papers behind a paywall, and typically permit online release of free-to-read versions only after a delay of at least six months — in compliance with the policies of influential funders such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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Putting the ‘s’ in Plan S
The initiative is spearheaded by Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission’s special envoy on open access. (The ‘S’ in Plan S can stand for ‘science, speed, solution, shock’, he says). In addition to the French, British and Dutch funders, national agencies in Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland and Slovenia have also signed, as have research councils in Italy and Sweden.
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Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7
(See also: https://www.scienceeurope.org/coalition-s/)

Time and again, changes happen not because Twitterstorms or street protests, but because some smart people got together and made it into a policy at the highest level.

“Paywalls are not only hindering the scientific enterprise itself but also they are an obstacle [to] the uptake of research results by the wider public,” says Marc Schiltz, president of Science Europe, a Brussels-based advocacy group that represents European research agencies and which officially launched the policy.

Smits says he took inspiration from the open-access policy of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the global health charity based in Seattle, Washington, which also demands immediate open-access publishing. Because Plan S forbids hybrid publishing — and because it involves multiple funders — its impacts could be even more far-reaching than the Gates policy, which by itself has nudged several influential journals to change their publishing models.

Huh?

Sounds bad. Sounds like a new government department to be filled with a hundred government workers and costing millions of tax dollars.

Not one more penny is needed. It's scientific publication, after all. Meaning you are subject to the scrutiny of all other scientists, many of them competing with you, for the same funding. In that sense, everyone "snitches" on each other. It's not a perfect system, but sooner or later you may end up with tattered reputation if you do something out of the line. That's how plagiarism, fake degrees are discovered. That's how fake data are discovered (e.g. Hwang Woo-Suk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk). That's how Andrew Wakefield (the MMR vaccine theory on autism) was discredited. That, is also how Hans Asperger was discovered to be a Nazi collaborator, albeit many decades later. Not a perfect system, but it works pretty well in practice.

Who pays for the computer equipment to maintain the publications, computer maintenance, database administrators, server administrators, IT people, workers to upload the documents, security, electricity, the building to hold all of this ... and a hundred other costs? Right now, there're "pay walls" that help offset these costs.

Who pays for the computer equipment to maintain the publications, computer maintenance, database administrators, server administrators, IT people, workers to upload the documents, security, electricity, the building to hold all of this ... and a hundred other costs ?

Right now, there're "pay walls" that help offset these costs.

Never underestimate the power of one determined person. What Carole Cadwalladr has done to Facebook and big data, and Edward Snowden has done to the state security complex, the young Kazakhstani scientist Alexandra Elbakyanhas done to the multibillion-dollar industry that traps knowledge behind paywalls. Sci-Hub, her pirate web scraper service, has done more than any government to tackle one of the biggest rip-offs of the modern era: the capture of publicly funded research that should belong to us all. Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible. No one would publicly disagree with these sentiments. Yet governments and universities have allowed the big academic publishers to deny these rights. Academic publishing might sound like an obscure and fusty affair, but it uses one of the most ruthless and profitable business models of any industry.

The model was pioneered by the notorious conman Robert Maxwell. He realised that, because scientists need to be informed about all significant developments in their field, every journal that publishes academic papers can establish a monopoly and charge outrageous fees for the transmission of knowledge. He called his discovery “a perpetual financing machine”. He also realised that he could capture other people’s labour and resources for nothing. Governments funded the research published by his company, Pergamon, while scientists wrote the articles, reviewed them and edited the journals for free. His business model relied on the enclosure of common and public resources. Or, to use the technical term, daylight robbery.

As his other ventures ran into trouble, he sold his company to the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier. Like its major rivals, it has sustained the model to this day, and continues to make spectacular profits. Half the world’s research is published by five companies: Reed Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell and the American Chemical Society. Libraries must pay a fortune for their bundled journals, while those outside the university system are asked to pay $20, $30, sometimes $50 to read a single article.

While open-access journals have grown rapidly, researchers still have to read the paywalled articles in commercial journals. And, because their work is assessed by those who might fund, reward or promote them according to the impact of the journals in which they publish, many feel they have no choice but to surrender their research to these companies. Science ministers come and go without saying a word about this rip-off...