The so-called cOAlition-S, consisting of 13 research funding organizations and three charitable foundations, recently launched it’s Plan S which has the aim of creating a major shift in publishing practices. (The “S” stands for “science, speed, shock, solution”). It was launched on 4th September this year, and the implementation plan was published 27th November. It has received a fair amount of critisism, and more importantly: a great deal of uncertainty and concern. (See our report here, and others here and here. For those reading Norwegian, some debate is collected here). While it is easy to agree on the ideal aims of the plan, it is a bit harder to judge the realism, unintended consequences and how the publishing industry will adapt. Here in Norway, about 1000 scientist have signed a letter demanding that the Norwegian research council would make a range of clarifications and do a thorough report on the plan’s consequences. So far, the Norwegian research council has refused to do so. Neither is there any report available on the homepage of cOAlition-S. In short: consequences have not been clarified, and certainly not in the open. I find this latter point quite ironic.
While making research results openly available to the public and policy makers is obviously necessary, but as is generally recognized, not all means are necessarily justified by a good cause. Plan S is a specific plan demaning all funded research to be published in Gold Open Access. Here is the reasoning from cOAlition-S
Universality is a fundamental principle of science (the term “science” as used here includes the humanities): only results that can be discussed, challenged, and, where appropriate, tested and reproduced by others qualify as scientific. Science, as an institution of organised criticism, can therefore only function properly if research results are made openly available to the community so that they can be submitted to the test and scrutiny of other researchers. Furthermore, new research builds on established results from previous research. The chain, whereby new scientific discoveries are built on previously established results, can only work optimally if all research results are made openly available to the scientific community.
Publication paywalls are withholding a substantial amount of research results from a large fraction of the scientific community and from society as a whole. This constitutes an absolute anomaly, which hinders the scientific enterprise in its very foundations and hampers its uptake by society. Monetising the access to new and existing research results is profoundly at odds with the ethos of science (Merton, 1973). There is no longer any justification for this state of affairs to prevail and the subscription-based model of scientific publishing, including its so-called ‘hybrid’ variants, should therefore be terminated. In the 21st century, science publishers should provide a service to help researchers disseminate their results. They may be paid fair value for the services they are providing, but no science should be locked behind paywalls!
I belive the sentence is at heart of the plan: “Monetising the access to new and existing research results is profoundly at odds with the ethos of science“. Easy to agree in principle. However, I do not see why monetising publishing is much better. Keep in mind that several big OA publishing houses are indeed commercial. Their source of income is the article processing charges (APC) instead of subscriptions. Thus, someone pays for publishing, one way or another. Plan S is portrayed as an ambitious plan to change the publishing models in science more broadly. There will be an end to “paying for research twice”, as they say. I am less convinced a new publishing model necessarily change the amount paid, though. But it will change who pays. Importantly, the plan does not do anything about the for-profit nature of publishing as such. cOAlition-S says it will make a report on article processing fees, but that is yet to come. They do say, though, that they belive prices will go down because of competition. Some market mechanisms are assumed to be involved, then.
Let’s assume Plan S works perfectly as intended: The whole publishing industry will be transformed and move to Gold Open Access. Subscription-based journals will perish. What is a likely scenario in this case?
Here are some basic conditions: 1) All costs and profits needs to be covered by article processing fees. 2) From the publishing houses’ perspective, the customers are no longer the libraries, but the individual researchers. 3) The research councils puts a ceiling on how much article publishing charge they will fund, 4) Existinc top-journals will switch to Gold OA or new top-journals will emerge, thus some kind of publishing hierachy will remain.
Then there is a basic question of how markets work: if demand goes up, so does the price, right? The very few generally recognized high-quality Gold OA journals will be able to charge more in article processing fees precisely because they are considered high quality. There is prestigue in publishing in the best outlets and such publications tend to have greater impact on the research community. That means both research institutions and individual researchers will be willing to pay for getting published there even if the research councils do not support it. Moreover, as long as such publications will help you land job (or tenure), researchers might even be willing to pay from their own pocket as it might pay in the longer run. For this reason, it is reasonable to expect that APCs for high-ranking journals might become very high while low-ranking journals might even be cheap. These are ordinary market mechanisms. However, Plan S states that compliance will be monitored and sanctioned, so that will restrict the prices, I suppose. Which leads us to the next point.
The supply-side will probably also increase. Small profits on each single article might be compensated by publishing more. Actually, high profits on each article would also motivate for publishing more. Importantly, the founders of Plan S states that in the age of internet, publishing costs are low and there is no need to charge much. This also means that scaling up is cheap. All journals could just publish a lot more. Why reject papers unless they’re absolutely crap? Any mediocre paper might be published for some extra dollars. Why not? Indeed, some journals do so already.
I am concerned it will create an environment where unneeded journals will thrive: Journals that might not be quite predatory – although not necessarily far from it. The direct economic incentives will be to publish each paper, and too few papers will be rejected. There is already too much junk out there, the last thing we need is to lower the bar for getting published. I do not see how Plan S will handle any of such concerns. There is no credible plan for marked regulations. I do not mind some regulations, and I think that is generally important, but market regulations is not that easy! It is way too optimistic to think the plan will have the desired consequences when no specific concerns have been detailed. The cOalition-S homepage is currently strikingly void of information beyond the ten principles and the implementation plan, and both are pretty vague and in general terms. I am not sure it is a plan at all, but rather some high sounding language made into regulations. A plan that sets out to change the economic model for scientific publishing should pay close attention to the market mechanisms of which it interfers.
From what I have seen so far, cOAlition-S have not done any analysis of how the plan might work in that regard. At least, such analyses have not at all been anywhere close to Gold Open Access, if published at all. An open debate and explicit considerations should be made in writing and open for anyone to see. I do not at all understand why the cOAlition-S decides not to be open!
I would also like to point out that how compliance will be monitored and sanctioned is very opaque. What would it take to curb the market? It might be rather rough measures – and it might be directed at the individual researcher. It remains open how far the cOAlition-S will be willing to go to ensure compliance.
I belive there are lots of problems with our publishing system. I could go on a bit about that. However, I fail to see Plan S solving any of my concerns with the current system, and I am worried it will even increase some of the problems.