ALLEA discusses Plan S at the Open Science Fair 2019

The 2019 Open Science Fair in Porto held on 16 to 18 September, featured a panel discussion on Plan S, the open access plan initiated by coalition of European funders to make all publicly funded-research open access from 2021.

On behalf of European academies and the academic community, ALLEA Board Member Luke Drury provided some insights on the current status of the project and underlined some of the key points introduced by the ALLEA statement on this matter.

The lively debate, chaired and facilitated by Inge van Nieuwerburgh (Ghent University), brought together various perspectives from national funding agencies, the so-called “Coalition S” and young researchers represented by Koen Vermeir, Chair of the Global Young Academy. The discussion focused on the need to include repositories and new publications models in order to avoid a continuation of the existing journal system.

The current status of Plan S was presented by Neil Jacobs, the interim programme manager for Plan S, who emphasised that there are, and always have been, multiple routes to compliance for Plan S and not only Gold Open Access. This model requires authors to publish their articles in an online open access journal in contrast to Green Open Access which allows for publishing in an a repository at the same time than releasing the research in non-open access journal.

The presentations from the event are available here.

Picture Credit: OSF