Abstract
The University of Vienna, in partnership with other organisations across Austria, has been at the forefront of the open access (OA) movement in Europe and has been actively broadening the OA publishing opportunities for its researchers for well over half a decade. Although the launch of Plan S in September 2018 by a group of funding bodies that includes the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) brought its unique challenges, it has also provided the international research community with a much-needed impetus, jolting publishers into action and raising awareness among university administrators and faculty in general. The announcement also prompted the Vienna University Library to perform a mapping exercise, with a view to assessing how well the current publishing agreements match the needs of the University’s researchers in light of the Plan S requirements. This article presents the results of this analysis and shares some of the challenges encountered through the negotiation and implementation of OA publishing agreements and how these, together with the revised Plan S implementation guidelines, have been informing the University’s strategy.
Highlights
Once the dust had settled following the announcement of the Plan S initiative on 4 September 2018, many institutions across Europe and beyond may have been left wondering how their researchers will be able to continue with their publishing activities without major disruptions come January 2020, the original start date of Plan S
While this may well be the case on a global level for estimated to be under 7% in 2017,12 the authors had an inkling that, knowing FWF’s prominence across the Austrian research landscape, a significant portion of our papers will have resulted from cOAlition S funding
As part of the second mapping exercise, the status of each journal with relevant publications was assessed against a simplified version of the Plan S criteria: are these journals fully open access and listed in the DOAJ? Or are they part of one of the University’s transformative agreements? It should be noted that some journals listed in the DOAJ and included in this study will have more work to do than others to be fully Plan S compliant by 2021: approximately 77% of the University’s DOAJ-indexed OA articles were published in journals that offer CC BY licences to its authors, a key Plan S requirement
Summary
Once the dust had settled following the announcement of the Plan S initiative on 4 September 2018, many institutions across Europe and beyond may have been left wondering how their researchers will be able to continue with their publishing activities without major disruptions come January 2020, the original start date of Plan S. While the start has been postponed by one year, and the requirements somewhat refined in the ‘Revised Implementation Guidance on Plan S Following Public Feedback Exercise’,1 one thing is certain: it is no longer business as usual. With effect from 2021, cOAlition S funded researchers will be required to publish in Plan S compliant venues, such as ‘in Open Access. The implementation guidelines provide further details on the three main routes for being ‘one thing is certain: it compliant with Plan S:3 is no longer business. Subscription venues (repository route): authors publish in a subscription journal and make either the final published version (Version of Record [VoR]) or the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) openly available in a repository without embargo. Transition of subscription venues such as transformative arrangements and transformative journals.[4]
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