The recently published guidance for the implementation of Plan S offers welcome new details on how full and immediate Open Access to research publications would be achieved under this new initiative.
As LIBER stated in September, when Plan S was first announced, we fully support the ambitions of Plan S. It aligns with LIBER’s 2018-2022 Strategy — specifically our goal to make Open Access the main form of publishing — and our Open Science Roadmap. Within this new guidance, we are pleased to see that the green route to Open Access has been acknowledged as we believe there is no single route to Open Access.
LIBER calls on its research libraries to support Plan S by:
- Negotiating transformative Open Access agreements with publishers with the next renewal. Libraries can follow LIBER’s Five Principles for Negotiations with Publishers;
- Raising awareness about the new requirements and training researchers so that they can meet these standards;
- Developing institutional repositories which support the Plan S mission, and encouraging and supporting researchers and students to use these repositories;
- Supporting and helping to develop global Open Access infrastructure, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals via SCOSS;
- Directly facilitating Open Access as publishers of information, rather than only curating it for access and long-term preservation.
As Plan S develops, it will be important to ensure that its principles are fully integrated within the broader research workflow. At the moment, Plan S focuses heavily on Open Access for articles but it needs to be seen in the broader context of the Open Science ecosystem to which we aspire.
LIBER’s Open Access Working Group is working on a set of recommendations and resources for the research library community to help them implement these strategies. LIBER encourages libraries to send their feedback to the guidance.
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