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After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results of research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.
(Plan S, key principle, September 4, 2018)
The European Commission, European Research Council, and the national science funding organisations of Austria, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden and the UK together fund €7.6 billion of research. In a combined initiative (Plan S), that research must be freely accessible from January 1, 2020 on: anybody must be able to freely download, translate or re-use the resulting papers.
In cases where no quality open access journals or infrastructure exist, the members of Plan S will provide incentives and support to do so.
Any open access publication fees will be funded by the funding organizations, and not individual researchers; universities, libraries and other research organizations will be asked to align their policies and strategies.
The funding organizations will monitor compliance, and punish non-compliance.
This might change the face of scientific publishing in two years time, posits Nature. If the point of punishing non-compliance isn't contentious enough, another one of Plan S's principles might be:
The 'hybrid' model of publishing is not compliant with the above principles.
As currently only 15 percent of scientific publications are open access, this would mean that scientists involved will be barred from publishing in 85% of journals, including influential titles such as Nature and Science.
Also at Science Magazine and the PLoS Blog.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday September 05 2018, @01:50AM
The advantage of a journal instead of a random website is vetting. Scientific communication depends on being able to find relevant, high-quality research. Anybody can have a website or slap something up. But how will other researchers find it? If they do, how will they know it's not a BS finding?
Yes, a lot of BS gets into journals too -- less so in top tier ones in a given discipline. Journals do help with the filter and help people be able to locate findings... And editing and review often does significantly improve articles beyond the raw submissions.
As to why it costs -- well, as with just about anything, if you've never been involved in trying to run something, you likely don't really how much work is involved. I tried to outline some of the costs as part of my post here [soylentnews.org].