## Strengths of the UKRI Open Access funding policy for long-form publications

* **Specific funding budgets.** By defining a specific avenue for OA funding for long-form publications on top of (and not included in) their Open Access Block Grants for UK institutions, the UKRI have made the administrative workflow more complex but also made the funding initiative much easier to report on. This will allow the economic datasets to be made openly available for analysis.

* **Funding model flexibility.** The funding policy doesn't only cover Book Processing Charges (BPCs) but also proposes mechanisms to fund the publication of Open Access books and book chapters in Diamond OA and non-BPC venues. A diverse, all-encompassing funding model will allow to explore the differences in uptake across the various routes.

* **Funding caps.** The introduction of maximum amounts of funding (aka funding caps) for books and book chapters below the rates that numerous publishers currently charge for their BPCs and CPCs signals a much-welcome attempt to influence the market. To what extent this works may also be the subject of a revealing analysis.

* **Institutional involvement.** The inclusion of a requirement for the funding applications to be channelled via the library allows the institutional Open Access support teams to build their advocacy towards Open Access for long-form publications on top of the policy and to engage in conversations with academics to explore the whole range of publishing venues.

## Pending work in the domain

* **Underpinning infrastructure.** There is a pressing need for the Open Access infrastructure for Green Open Access for books and book chapters that plays the role that SHERPA RoMEO does for journal articles. The SHERPA Books platform currently under construction [8] should become the go-to place for reliable information on fees for Gold OA for books (BPCs) and book chapters (CPCs) and for embargo period requirements for long-form publications by publisher.

* **Rights retention for long-form publications.** Discussions are taking place on whether it makes sense for institutional rights retention policies to also apply to these long-form publications. For journal articles, the *accepted manuscript* is the authors' intellectual property (IP), as no publishing agreement has yet been signed. However, for books (either commissioned or otherwise) the contract is usually signed upon the approval of a proposal, meaning that the peer-reviewed accepted manuscript may no longer be the intellectual property of the authors.

* **Third-party content.** It's not just this IP issue which casts doubts over the Green Open Access route for long-form publications. The issue of third-party content and the rights to it is also much more salient than in the case of journal articles. While authors will always clear those rights for the final published version of their books, this may not be sufficient for accepted manuscripts (AAMs) to include this third-party content. These 'gaps' would significantly diminish the value of AAMs, to the point that authors might not wish to make such trimmed versions openly available.

A significant amount of uncertainty still remains at present, and it's relevant to note that the proposed Open Access policy for books originally proposed for the next national research assessment exercise in the UK (REF2029) has been called off following the open consultation on the matter [9]. The publishing landscape for monographs is currently in flux and institutional publishing ventures are expected to gradually start making a difference. What is certain at this point is that funders – and specifically coAlition S funders – have a key role to play in this area going forward.
## REFERENCES

[1] Paul Ginsparg (2021). Lessons from arXiv's 30 years of information sharing. Nat Rev Phys 3, 602-603 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-021-00360-z

[2] Kent R Anderson (2020). bioRxiv: Trends and analysis of five years of preprints. Learned Publishing 33(2): 104-109.
https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1265

[3] Jeffrey Brainard (2024). "In a bold bid to avoid open-access fees, Gates foundation says grantees must post preprints". Science News. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.zqvd4bu

[4] Roger C Schonfeld, Oya Y Rieger (2020). Publishers Invest in Preprints. The Scholarly Kitchen.
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/05/27/publishers-invest-in-preprints

[5] coalition S (2021). coalition S statement on Open Access for academic books. https://www.coalition-s.org/coalition-s-statement-on-open-access-for-academic-books/

[6] FWF Open Access Policy for Peer-Reviewed Book Publications, https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/about-us/what-we-do/open-science/open-access-policy/open-access-policy-for-peer-reviewed-book-publications

[7] Katharina Rieck (2023). Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Publication Cost Data 2022 [Data set]. Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8146200

[8] SHERPA Books (beta), https://beta.sherpa.ac.uk/oa-books

[9] REF Funding Authorities (2024). Early decisions made on REF 2029 Open Access Policy: there will be no longform open access mandate. https://www.ref.ac.uk/publication/early-decisions-on-ref-2029-open-access-policy/
## 4.5. THE IMPACT OF PLAN S BEYOND ITS STRICT AREA OF INFLUENCE: OPEN ACCESS AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Pursuing a more equitable scholarly communications landscape and listening to the voices denouncing a current research publishing ecosystem severely skewed towards the Global North are attitudes of paramount importance. These are issues cOAlition S have aimed to address. At the same time, improvements clearly need to take place locally in scholarly communications-related workflows to close the gap and address the current fragmentation. Only this way it will be possible to achieve the progress towards equity that has become one of the main challenges in the transition to a full, immediate Open Access landscape.

**Note:** It's very hard for a study produced in the Global North to address these issues in a fully balanced way, as the risk of bias is always there. The authors have nevertheless based this analysis on the outcome of the interviews with various stakeholders in the relevant geographies and are confident they accurately capture a number of challenges rarely discussed within the global Open Access conversation.

One of the most characteristic traits of the Open Access community is its pursuit of ever more ambitious objectives. The original top priority of the movement – accessibility – has for instance gradually been upgraded to accessibility *plus* affordability *plus* equity. [Chapter 5](#) below includes some words of caution on the risks associated with trying to fix all issues at once.

There are very valuable initiatives taking place in the Global South in the pursuit of a more affordable, equitable and inclusive scholarly communications landscape. Worth mentioning among these – because they have happened during the lifetime of Plan S and with its explicit support – are the two Global Diamond Open Access Summits, the first one hosted in Toluca (Mexico) in October 2023 and the

second one to be held in Cape Town (South Africa) in December 2024. These events build on top of a long-standing drive for affordable publishing business models that have particularly flourished in community-driven initiatives like SciELO, Redalyc or Amelica in Latin America. The work that organisations like EIFL and Lyrasis have conducted over many years to promote alternative scholarly communications models and platforms in Africa, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East is also worth noting.

However, when examining the various routes to achieve immediate Open Access proposed by Plan S, there are evident imbalances in how even the most Academia-friendly among these are being implemented in the Global North and the

Global South. The lack of enthusiasm that Plan S has provoked in the Global South during its first five years largely stems from its perceived support for unsustainable pay-to-publish business models. This may also explain why cOAlition S hasn't been able to more consistently grow its membership in the Global South.

The cOAlition S have stressed that Open Access for research produced in the Global South should by no means be assigned a lower priority, and made emphasis from the outset on the fact that fixing the issue of the inequity created by the pay-to-publish model is high on their list of challenges to address. There

<figure><img src="image_27.png" /></figure>

> "Advances around Open Access and Open Science in Southeast Asia are generally less pronounced [than in Eastern Europe and Africa] because of the differences across countries and the absence of an organisation like cOAlition S that can issue common recommendations"

*(Intl Open Science Organisation)*
is in fact clear evidence that this is being kept in mind in initiatives like the appointment of coAlition S ambassadors [1], the strong support for Diamond Open Access [2] or the launching of initiatives like the "Beyond article-based charges" working group [3].

This latter working group has recently released an update [4] stating their ambition to develop a framework where publisher business models can be assessed on the axis of equity. This will help inform the scholarly communications landscape and, if monitored over time, provide the means to track its evolution toward more sustainable and equitable models.

All this work notwithstanding, there are instruments in the Plan S policy toolbox that meet the three basic requirements of accessibility, affordability and equity but are in spite of that not being consistently implemented in the Global South. A number of aspects need to be taken into

account when examining this difficult topic of scholarly communications (and Open Access in particular) in the Global South. Some of these are:

1. **Scholarly communications is just the tip of the iceberg** in the global endeavour that research represents. When a general analysis is conducted of the numerous structural issues faced by research and its practitioners in the Global South [5], it becomes apparent that it is methodologically incorrect to assume that these issues can primarily be fixed by focusing on Open Access to research results.

2. There are **dramatic differences between North and South in the levels of investment in research, development and innovation** as per the OECD figures [6]. This research funding divide underpins attitudes to scholarly communications and has prompted frequent discussions with interviewees on the topic of “research information consumers vs producers”. This is a notoriously treacherous area to address from a Global North perspective alone – hence the disclaimer above. At the same time it is rarely alluded to in the literature on Open Access despite its evident relevance.

3. There are also **severe shortcomings in the area of institutional Open Access support services in the Global South**. Institutional research libraries have been doing much of the heavy lifting in terms of Open Access policy implementation and monitoring for many years now. There are well-established procedures and best practices libraries and their Open Access support services tend to follow – at least in developed countries. There aren't too many studies comparing the levels of support provided by institutions in the Global North vs South from a scholarly communications perspective [7], but the differences are stark from both a human and a technical infrastructure viewpoint. This is particularly critical for the purpose of implementing Green Open Access.

4. **Widespread lack of data on APC payments in the Global South** [8]. If the data for APC payments in whole regions is not available (because the necessary support services aren't there either), it's very hard to afford any kind of evidence-based decision-making process. As a result, the discussion on the most appropriate Open Access strategy to follow tends to be strongly influenced by [Open Access] ideology and marketing.

5. **Opaque workflows and unclear responsibilities.** Authors are still paying APCs from their own pockets in the confidence that they will be refunded via institutional mechanisms to reward top-level publications [9]. This is incidentally not just happening in the Global South and constitutes one of the main breaches of the Plan S principles (#4) identified in the course of this study.

<figure><img src="image_28.png" /></figure>

> "There are two big problems for Green Open Access implementation [in developing countries]: lack of human resources in libraries and lack of researcher incentives for the deposit of accepted manuscripts"

*(Library Consortium)*
The Open APC initiative releases data sets on
fees paid for Open Access journal articles by
universities and research institutions under an
Open Database License.

420 institutions from Europe have contributed to the OpenAPC project. Click on the country for details.

Is your institution paying article processing charges for gold open access publishing? Join the OpenAPC Initiative, and help building an open data set on publishing fees!

<figure><img src="image_29.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 3.** U Bielefeld-based OpenAPC Treemap gathers aggregated information on APC payments worldwide<fnref n="18" />. While originally a European initiative, data should not be limited to Global North countries.</figcaption></figure>

6. **Insufficient data on publishing models and amounts of publications per model.** Even for funded publications by national research funding agencies there is limited data, which again makes it very difficult to identify the actual status of the scholarly communications landscape and the impact of specific policy interventions over it. This is rapidly improving with the availability of ever more sophisticated data sources and data analysis techniques at an international level, but there should be specific efforts at a local level aimed at capturing the status of a local scholarly communications landscape in a permanent state of flux [10].

There is hence a pressing need for all parties involved to pull their weight. The cOAlition S are largely making the right conceptual moves, and there is some progress in areas like (i) the development of globally fairer pricing model framework, (ii) the exploration of options to soften the impact of the pay-to-publish model on Global South-based researchers and (iii) the gradual diversification of editorial boards and manuscript submissions. None of this will achieve the desired effect however unless there is an equivalent commitment to strengthen the local scholarly communication workflows in Global South countries.

The gradual – and relatively widespread – adoption of transformative agreements in Global South countries [11] is also worth a specific mention here. Be it institutional, national or international (such as EIFL) in scope, the perceptions on these mechanisms vary across stakeholders and countries. There is awareness of the significant savings offered by this model when compared to the payment of individual APCs. There is also the realisation of the possible advantages that a more centralised workflow for the payment of Open Access publishing fees might entail in terms of collecting the key data (in the absence of publicly available data on APC payments at an institutional, national or supranational level in the Global South it's of course not possible to ascertain how many APCs are paid "in the wild", i.e. by researchers themselves, but the practice is widespread). And there is the awareness that these mechanisms may not be economically sustainable in the long run.

As a result of the emphasis on the issue made by cOAlition S [12], publishers are also trying to address these shortcomings. Large commercial publishers like Elsevier have adopted a Geographical Pricing for Open Access (GPOA) pilot [13] partially aligned with the exploration of a purchasing power parity framework promoted by cOAlition S. It would be appropriate for cOAlition S to eventually comment on the results of the pilot and to recommend its extension into a more permanent framework if it proves successful.

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Regions and countries in black colour are providing at least partial APC data to OpenAPC. Clicking on a country/region turns it green and displays the number of institutions in that country/region providing APC data</footnote>
Publishers exploring the business model transformation that Plan S originally demanded – such as Cambridge University Press via their Open Equity Initiative [14] – are finding innovative ways for the publishing costs in the Global South to be 'subsidised' by the wealthier institutions and countries following a pattern that resembles the SCOAP3 initiative without the burdensome bureaucracy. These developments are often based in the tweaking of presently existing transformative agreements. These experiments would seem to asymptotically tend towards a global *subscribe to open* (S2O) model where a worldwide open publishing model would largely be sustained by the wealthier institutions in the

Global North. This is where the role of consortia may become critical in the forthcoming years within a wider trend towards a diversification of publishing models.

<figure><img src="image_30.png" /></figure>

"As part of our annual reports to the Ministry we are able to monitor the publications we fund. We see that Open Access is steadily growing in S Africa, but we struggle to track how the payments are happening"

(Funder)

## REFERENCES

[1] cOAlition S ambassadors, https://www.coalition-s.org/ambassadors/

[2] cOAlition S (2022). Action Plan for Diamond Open Access: Working collectively towards an equitable, community-driven and academic-led scholarly publishing model, https://www.coalition-s.org/action-plan-for-diamond-open-access/

[3] Roheena Anand, Robert Kiley, Anna Vernon (2023). Beyond article-based charges: working group established. cOAlition S blog. https://www.coalition-s.org/beyond-article-based-charges-working-group-established/

[4] Robert Kiley, Anna Vernon, Roheena Anand (2024). Beyond article-based charges working group: an update on progress. cOAlition S blog. https://www.coalition-s.org/beyond-article-based-charges-working-group-an-update-on-progress/

[5] Carlos S. Galina, José F. Martínez, Bruce D. Murphy (2023). Constraints on Research in Biological and Agricultural Science in Developing Countries: The Example of Latin America. Publications 2023, 11(2), 22; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11020022

[6] Percentage of GDP invested in research and development, https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm

[7] Pallares, C., Vélez Cuartas, G., Uribe-Tirado, A., Restrepo, D., Ochoa, J., Suárez, M. (2022). Situación del acceso abierto y los pagos por APC en Colombia. Un modelo de análisis aplicable a Latinoamérica. Revista Española De Documentación Científica, 45(4), e342. https://doi.org/10.3989/redc.2022.4.1931

[8] OpenAPC Tree maps, https://treemaps.openapc.net/

[9] One specific example for how this APC reimbursement workflow operates without any involvement from libraries or Open Access support services is available at Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola in Peru, https://usil.edu.pe/investigacion/publicaciones-capacitacion/servicios, but there are many others. Some mechanism ought to be found for increasing regional transparency around these figures for APC payments. In the Global North, research libraries are the actors typically tasked with the responsibility of collecting and making available the data, but this workflow is largely missing in the Global South.

[10] María del Rosario Rodríguez León (2024). La era de los Acuerdos Transformativos: publicar en acceso abierto. Noticias DGBSDI UNAM. https://www.dgb.unam.mx/index.php/noticias-y-eventos/noticias/748-la-era-de-los-acuerdos-transformativos-publicar-en-acceso-abierto

[11] Consorcio Colombia. Acuerdos transformativos. https://www.consortiocolombia.co/acuerdos-transformativos/

[12] cOAlition S (2023). "Developing a globally fair pricing model for Open Access academic publishing". cOAlition S blog. https://www.coalition-s.org/developing-a-globally-fair-pricing-model-for-open-access-academic-publishing/

[13] Elsevier Geographical Pricing for Open Access (GPOA) pilot, https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/pricing#4-gpoa-pilot

[14] Cambridge Open Equity Initiative, https://www.cambridge.org/core/open-research/open-access/cambridge-open-equity-initiative#
## 4.6. A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR RESEARCHERS

One of the main issues around a 'broken' scholarly communications ecosystem is the historical decoupling between its end-users the researchers and those trying to advocate for its reform. The consequences of this decoupling are particularly severe in the lack of awareness of researchers of the cost implications of their publishing choices. Aware of this, some institutions where Open Access and Open Science have reached the agenda of their top managers are considering mechanisms to raise awareness of these costs and use that as a driver towards more affordable publishing patterns. These mechanisms involve sharing the publishing costs between their research library and the departments where the publishing actually happens. These developments, which would alleviate the financial pressure on research libraries allowing them to invest in alternative, more sustainable publishing models, are examined in this section.

Perhaps the main problem in the historical development of the Open Access movement has been the severe decoupling between the end-users of the research publishing ecosystem – the researchers – and those advocating for its reform. This has been an issue since the very early days of the Budapest Open Access Declaration in 2002, which expected researchers to painstakingly self-archive copies of their full-text accepted manuscripts in their institutional repositories. These workflows slowly improved over time – with delegate or mediated deposit addressing this issue just described and CRIS systems helpfully complementing repositories as one-stop-shop for researchers to deposit their manuscripts – but the issue is still well alive. The understandably positive attitudes of researchers towards transformative agreements are but the latest resurfacing of this deeply-ingrained divide.

More often than not the efforts to devise an alternative, more equitable and academia-controlled publishing ecosystem are underpinned by a “build it and they’ll come” assumption. This applies particularly to Diamond OA, where numerous initiatives are underway to develop the sort of competitive infrastructure that will offer researchers the opportunity to move away from inequitable and economically unsustainable publishing practices. However, the challenges associated to the changes in publishing culture are enormous. There are plenty of indications in the publishing ecosystem already – from the still modest uptake of Open Research platforms to the almost negligible percentages of funded publications being presently published under this specific Diamond Open Access business model<fnref n="19" /> – showing that it’s not enough to build the infrastructure to create the desired change.

An argument regularly used by researchers for continuing to rely on the *Journal Impact Factor* as a key criteria for choosing where to submit their manuscripts is that this is the way their performance is evaluated. This is now starting to be addressed by the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (COARA) and other similar initiatives, but it will take time for this complex initiative to bring about the kind of meaningful change in research evaluation practice that the system requires. The development of a reliable alternative publishing ecosystem will also take at least a few years. Quicker strategies to bring home the issue of publishing costs to researchers, research groups and departments may be possible while the consolidation of the Diamond OA infrastructure, the exploration of the possible alternative offered by preprints and the reform of research assessment happen.

Same as it is the case for the access to the research literature – which would seem to be free to the beneficiary, partly because the figures for how much this actually costs institutions are hidden behind confidentiality clauses – the otherwise administratively very smooth (for the end-user) Read & Publish agreement model deftly hides the costs associated to the publishing activity from researchers. All they see is that publishing their work Gold Open Access as encouraged by their research funders has become

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ The all-time oa.report dashboard produced (in beta) for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is one of the few pioneering efforts to capture the rate of Diamond OA articles among the BMGF-funded publications. It currently amounts to a meagre 1.2% of the total (but is higher than the number of closed articles).</footnote>
easier than it ever was – it's little wonder then that they like this model so much. The issue of the library budgets becoming locked-in into these arrangements and the issue of where the funding for these may actually be coming from are not aspects (most) researchers are aware of or interested in.

What to do then to make researchers sensitive to the costs of publishing while more sustainable alternatives emerge? One straightforward answer would be “let them face these costs themselves”. At least partially.

However, this simple argument translates into a notoriously more complex organisational framework to at least share the costs of publishing between the library and the institutional departments and faculties. The interviews with Open Access experts and Library Directors held as a basis for the qualitative side of this study show that this shared-cost model is starting to independently emerge at institutions in different countries. No bibliographic references can be provided at this point for these internal discussions on distribution of costs because all interviewees who have mentioned them have

requested confidentiality due to the political sensitiveness of the topic. The approach makes sense though as an attempt to raise the issue with researchers that their choices of publishing venue have immediate economic consequences from which they have been insulated for too long.

Even if those institutions exploring this shared-cost model manage to successfully implement it, this will not fix all the issues. New internal inequalities are likely to arise between the ‘funded’ and the ‘unfunded’ researchers and between senior and early career researchers. From the perspective of a transition towards more affordable publishing models, this would nevertheless mean progress – not least in allowing libraries to reinvest any savings arising from this shared-cost arrangement into further support for the gradual emergence of alternative publishing models.

The key barrier when considering this ‘modest proposal’ for researchers is that libraries have traditionally been among the least politically powerful actors in the scholarly communications ecosystem, and particularly within their own institutions. It’s no coincidence that the universities where this shared-cost model is being discussed, even tested, have powerful libraries able to have their voice and arguments heard within the institutional top echelons. The emergence in recent years of institutional Heads or Delegates for Open Science directly reporting to the Rector or Vice-rector for Research has also helped making the argument – these positions are typically not organically part of the library but sit conceptually close to them.

The model may vary depending on the local mix of disciplines and publishing patterns at each institution, but it essentially involves figuring out a mechanism whereby the cost of publishing (i.e. of joining agreements with publishers both hybrid and fully Open Access and paying for APCs) is at least in part transferred to the departments depending on how much publishing they do. The library would first need to calculate the aggregated costs of publishing [1] and would then oversee the application of the scheme.

Departments would in turn need to have a say in the discussions on what agreements to join, which would require a regular communication channel to be devised for these matters to be discussed. This would work best on the basis of a distributed Open Access support network embedded into

<figure><img src="image_31.png" /></figure>

> "We are toying with ideas like pulling all the funding streams into a single model where there is a sharing of the costs for publishing between the central resources and the labs so that irrespective of how something is published we try to keep a stable ratio between Central and the labs. We want central budgets to be more controlable, that is, not an ever-expanding pot"

*(Open Science Expert)*
departments. This is another reason why this distributed and embedded Open Access support network
is included in the recommendations arising from this study.

Some may say this is unworkable – and it may be that it is indeed unworkable at institutions where the library has little or no political clout. But it is already being explored, even already happening at some institutions. A further recommendation from this study would be for these emerging shared-cost schemes at institutions to be made visible. This doesn’t necessarily mean making them openly available for anyone to see – this raises the same issue that prevents the actual costs of reading to be widely available, namely the ruthless competition across institutions who may be getting better deals for subscriptions than their neighbours – but there may be strategic forums [2] where these models can internally be discussed behind closed doors and where best practice case studies can be examined.

REFERENCES

[1] Gernot Deinzer, Cornelia Lang (2024). "All in One: Informationsbudget an der Universität Regensburg. Umsetzung, Strukturen und Geschäftsprozesse". Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie : ZfBB 71(2): 91-101.
https://epub.uni-regensburg.de/57999/

[2] European University Institute (2023). "Over 100 academic librarians come together for the LIBER Winter Event". EUI News, https://www.eui.eu/news-hub?id=over-100-academic-librarians-come-together-for-liber-event-symposium
## 4.7. PUBLISHERS AND PLAN S

From the perspective of today, it's hard to conceive a scholarly communications landscape without the publishers. Scholarly publishing is shifting though, and there are insistent calls for supporting the consolidation of innovative, more affordable and equitable publishing practices. The role of funders vis-à-vis publishers is a difficult one to summarise given the variety of publishers and their stances. Plan S was often criticised upon its release for playing into the hands of publishers, but it has proved instrumental in attracting publishers to the negotiating table with consortia and in becoming a well-respected voice among publishers on how the publishing landscape should evolve. This section examines the role of publishers with regard to Plan S and their attitudes on the routes to achieve immediate Open Access that Plan S has proposed.

It's worth starting a section on publishers and Plan S by pointing out that "publishers" is a misnomer. Publishers – understood for the purpose of this section as journal publishers – come in many sizes and formats. The growing diversification in the range of business models underpinning research publishing will only increase the landscape complexity. For a balanced exploration of the role of publishers with regard to Plan S it would be necessary to at least distinguish the fully Open Access publishers with

**APC-based** business models from the **'hybrid'** and the **subscription publishers** (especially the very large commercial publishers commonly known as “The Big Five”). Society publishers and their attitudes should also be separately considered. **Diamond OA** and **Open Journal Systems** (OJS)-based or equivalent institutional publishers (including university presses) would be a further, much smaller category in terms of their publishing share and costs.

Each of these categories of publishers would merit a specific analysis with regard to their stance on Plan S and to the reaction to the initiative by its members, but even this would be too complex given the differences across individual publishers regardless of what category

they are classified into. On a similar vein, it is a gross simplification to critically refer to "the publishers" with just one or two of them in mind.

It is simpler to examine the publishers' reactions to the different strategies proposed by Plan S to achieve immediate Open Access. These are broadly APC-based Gold Open Access, **Hybrid OA** via **transformative arrangements** and immediate Green OA under **rights retention**.

Before looking into the reactions to each of these Plan S instruments it makes sense to start with a couple of general considerations around commercial publishers within the wider scholarly communications ecosystem described in section 2.3. Historically there is a trend where publishers try to leave the libraries – as a proxy for any stakeholder trying to reform a dysfunctional scholarly communications system – outside the conversation they have with their customers the researchers. The seminal reflection “Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?” published in The Guardian in 2017 [1] correctly identifies the origins of the issue in the aggressive commercial overtures towards researchers and their means of communicating research findings in the 1950s.

Nothing has changed too much since then. In general, researchers want (need) to publish their results as quickly as possible in as high a **Journal Impact Factor** (JIF) title as possible to claim the priority and

<figure><img src="image_32.png" /></figure>

> "Plan S, through the lens of the publisher, has clearly accelerated market consolidation, and that has had an impact on society publishing, on non-for-profit, and for smaller and medium-sized commercial publishers, many of whom have really struggled with the scale element that is implicit in the model"

(Publisher)
make sure they are read by those who matter. Publishers are able to offer this service, and because their titles are supported by an Editorial Board composed of expert peers in the specific discipline, they wield a far larger influence over the author than the laypersons at the institutional libraries able to guide academics to avoid (all too frequent) publisher malpractice – especially regarding costs. The recommendation this study offers for a distributed, embedded Open Access implementation network at institutions tries to address the root cause for the public budget waste regularly arising from these circumstances.

There is a considerable reputational damage to publishers as a result of this situation, but the damage does not reach the realm of the researcher. On the contrary, academics often see both the librarians' and the funders' positions on Open Access (as for consortia, they largely don't know these entities even exist) as an inevitable administrative burden. As stated in section 2.6, within the funder-consortium-library ecosystem, funders have the best mechanisms to exert some influence over researchers, but even that will be limited, mediated as it will be by libraries.

The onset of APC-based Gold Open Access abruptly changed that. For the first time ever, it was not the Open Access/Open Science advocates who were regularly reaching out to request an accepted manuscript, a dataset or a data management plan from the researcher – but the other way round. Suddenly there was an interest to listen to the requests from the library – if the funding for the research publishing was made available in exchange. The funding largely came from research funders, and this offered them an avenue to press for their policy requirements.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the pay-to-publish model – if only those actors economically profiting from them could be persuaded to “publish responsibly”. When they do not, the reputational damage not only reaches Open Access advocates, research funders and occasionally researchers [2]. It also tarnishes the whole publishing sector.

Funders have limited leverage over publishers, but they are the best-placed actor in the ecosystem to exert some change. Plan S has meant the most successful attempt made a group of research funders thus far to work together to address the pressing issues in research publishing. This attempt can only succeed if funders manage to galvanise the Open Access community around a set of shared goals. Some within research departments may consider the funders' attempts for the public sector to regain some control over scholarly communications as an example for the tail of Open Access/Open Science wagging the dog of research, but coAlition S and Plan S have made a big impact in this regard, not least by clearly stating what is wrong and how the issues could perhaps be fixed.

### 4.7.1. APC-based Gold OA and fully Open Access publishers

When the APC-based Gold Open Access publishing began to grow following the Finch report and subsequent policy interventions such as the awarding of specific funding for Open Access publishing to researchers and institutions by specific research funders, fully Open Access publishers presented

<figure><img src="image_33.png" /></figure>

> "Plan S and Coalition S have moved the needle on gold. And that's a good thing. But I think we're now at an inflection point where we have to ask the question, are we willing to face into some of this as a sector, including different stakeholders working together, or do the funders who drive Plan S really want their view of responsible publishing, which means really no market, in which case it's very hard to find any win-win and any sustainable path forward"

(Publisher)
themselves as the 'good guys'. Not only they charged no **subscriptions** – Open Access originally emerged in part as a reaction to the so-called serials crisis over fees for journal subscriptions – but all they published was immediate Open Access and under a **CC BY licence**.

Fast forward 10+ years and very few see fully OA publishers as the good guys anymore [3]. There are many reasonably priced, well-behaved APC-based fully OA publishers in the landscape – the best ones being those who publish just one, perhaps two titles – but the systematic application of scorched-earth economics by a few has drawn a cloud of suspicion over the whole sector. The issues around unsustainable costs, impact on research quality and sheer volume of publications are explored in more detail in section 4.3 on fully Gold Open Access.

That section also looks into the positive sides – the significant growth in the offer of fully Gold Open Access titles so that nowadays researchers in all disciplines have at least a handful of titles at their disposal.

There are also fully Open Access publishers like the Public Library of Science (PLoS) who understand the role of a publisher as one stakeholder within a wider and diverse scholarly communications ecosystem to which they are able to contribute valuable innovations such as article-level metrics [4]. It's no surprise that PLoS are the only publisher among the three co-organisers of the Beyond Article-Based Charges working group organised by cOAlition S to discuss more equitable publishing business models going forward [5].

But again there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this specific business model, if only the enormous budgets invested in subscriptions could be liberated and used to pay for Open Access publishing costs as advocated by the OA2020 movement and cOAlition S.

### 4.7.2. Hybrid Open Access publishers

It's the **Hybrid Open Access** model that poses the biggest issues in the current publishing landscape. The **transformative arrangement** strategy devised by Plan S aimed to incentivise the flipping of hybrid OA journals to a fully OA business model via a double mechanism: transformative (aka Read & Publish) agreements and **transformative journals**. The speed at which this transition is (barely) happening at the very large commercial (hybrid) publishers is so slow that the whole strategy is very likely to be abandoned despite its non-negligible advantages. It's again a case of a few bad apples polluting the whole barrel – there are numerous hybrid publishers in the landscape trying to meet the Plan S guidance and although they may not have been as quick in evolving their business models as cOAlition S funders would like, some of them have properly done their homework.<fnref n="20" />

Some of these publishers attempting to comply are Cambridge University Press and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). The MIT Press deserve a special mention here, as it's not only gradually flipping its hybrid journal portfolio but has also launched its shift+OPEN programme to support external journals and flip them to Diamond OA model.

Hybrid publishers often argue that flipping a journal is a risky move that will typically be followed by a (temporary) slump in submissions as a consequence of the introduction of mandatory Open Access publishing charges. But the criteria for transformative journals introduced by cOAlition S [6] seem

<footnote n="20">²⁰ As a consequence of feuds both historical and present, there is a permanent 'information war' being waged between the public sector bodies and the commercial publishing entities. This explains that when discussing Open Access and transformative agreements with public sector advocates, the figures that get systematically mentioned are the 36% profit margin and the 70 years to flip the whole journal portfolio if the current speed remained unchanged. This entirely understandable attitude is somewhat unfair towards the good actors in the publishing landscape and doesn't always help fixing the issues.</footnote>
flexible enough to allow for a mid-term planning that addresses these risks. However, the results of the four annual analysis of the evolution of transformative journals that the cOAlition S have conducted thus far (reports 2021-2024 for the years 2020-2023) have been highly disappointing.

While widespread increases in the rate of Open Access articles can be observed on hybrid titles, also as a result of their inclusion in Read & Publish agreements, these results reveal that as a rule the larger – and closer to the shareholder-owned model – the publisher, the more sluggish the pace of change tends to be in terms of journal flipping. Publishers committed to the transition interviewed for this study perceive that the timeline for the transition drawn by cOAlition S has been too hasty. In response to this, it's fair to argue that the paper where David Prosser proposed the hybrid OA model as a means to transition journals from closed to Open Access was published over 20 years ago [7].

Very large commercial publishers seem to rely of the 'loyalty' of researchers towards prestigious journals no matter what the research funders' policies may be on the matter<fnref n="21" />. However, this seems an increasingly risky approach at a time when a range of initiatives to promote alternative, more sustainable publishing models are steadily gathering momentum and may threaten the prestige publishers' business model. With CoARA and other parallel efforts to reform research assessment progressing at the same time [8] and a number of Plan S-compliant publishing venues moving from strength to strength such as the Open Library of Humanities [9], the researchers may be closer to realising that moving to a more sustainable publishing landscape is largely in their hands.

cOAlition S announced in January 2023 that it would cease its economic support for transformative agreements and transformative journals by the end of 2024 [10]. The implications both positive and negative of this move for the post-2024 scholarly communications landscape have been examined in section 4.1. From a publisher perspective, there don't seem to be major concerns about this among very large commercial (hybrid) publishers or (evidently) among fully Open Access publishers. The former are confident that they may be able to continue operating these Read & Publish agreements for at least a few more years under the exception that the cOAlition S statement allows for specific funders within the alliance<fnref n="22" /> and in countries with no representation in cOAlition S, of which there are many in Europe alone.

The way the recommendations address this potential lack of impact of the cOAlition S decision on transformative arrangements is the suggestion for institutions and consortia to be ruthless in their assessment of the value of Read & Publish agreements going forward and to not be afraid to walk away from them like others have dared doing [11]. This referenced cancellation incidentally represents a litmus test currently underway for the suggested tough stance with regard to so-called transformative agreements – the monetisation of rights retention should not be accepted under any circumstances.

<footnote n="21">²¹ This issue hasn't been addressed in the section devoted to Open Access and the Global South above, but it's worth a note here. Researchers in Global South countries will frequently understand equity to mean they should also be able to publish Gold Open Access in the high-JIF titles their Global North counterparts are so fond of. This other interpretation of equity ultimately involves a race to the bottom. Hence the suggestion for institutional Open Access support services to be reinforced in the Global South. And hence the modest proposal in the previous section above.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² "Exceptionally, individual cOAlition S funders may still choose to financially participate in Transformative Agreements beyond 2024 as part of their respective national strategies. Such exceptions will be communicated on the cOAlition S website"</footnote>
### 4.7.3. Publishers and rights retention strategies

Open Access advocates make a consistent argument for *rights retention policies* as a necessary complement to Read & Publish agreements: rights retention can be applied where these do not reach, namely where corresponding authors elsewhere are not covered by any such deal. This applies both to 'funders' rights retention' and to the increasingly widespread *institutional rights retention policies*.

Given the significant investment that these agreements involve, these institutional Open Access advocates consider that this is a practical, unstated compromise that allows sustained progress towards full immediate Open Access via different, complementary routes. 'Rights retention clauses' are in fact ever more frequently finding their way into the wording of evolved Read & Publish agreements in some countries thanks to the efforts of university library consortia. These clauses state that no manuscript will be rejected or cascaded to a fully Open Access journal just because it carries some kind of rights retention wording.

Publishers' views on this development are mixed. Some see it as a threat to their business model [12] and consider it unfair that there hasn't been any mechanism to reward publishers who allowed an embargo-free deposit of 'their' full-text accepted manuscripts in repositories from the outset. Other publishers – particularly very large commercial publishers – see rights retention as a non-issue, arguing that researchers will always take the path of least resistance, namely the cost-free (for them) route offered by R&P deals or the APC-supported Gold OA.

The impact of rights retention policies will be proportional to the number of institutional publications in hybrid and closed journals for a given publisher. The higher this number, the higher also the likelihood that a significant fraction of them will not be covered by any R&P deal and will go immediate Green OA. This introduces a subtle balancing mechanism whereby the smaller the publisher, the lower the impact of rights retention on its publications.

There are of course more radical reactions to rights retention as a Plan S-supported strategy. Chief among these is the introduction of the Article Development Charge (ADC) concept by the American Chemical Society in September 2023 [13]. Finely spun as a step forward by the marketing specialists, the stakeholder engagement exercise conducted for this study uncovers its real nature as a naked attempt at monetising rights retention. The reputational damage that these moves do to the always complicated relation between institutions and publishers is immeasurable – not to mention the fact that the implementation of ADCs is often unworkable in practice. The self-inflicted damage – Finland has been the first country to drop the agreement altogether [11] and other countries may well follow suit – extends moreover to the whole commercial publishing sector. The only way for progress towards the Plan S objectives in a joint fashion is to build a modicum of trust between both sides of the divide.

### 4.7.4. A word on book publishers

Open Access policies are gradually extending into the area of book publishing. Books and book chapters featured in Plan S (principle #7) as originally released in September 2018 and in the statement on Open Access for academic books issued by cOAlition S three years later. This latter statement included five recommendations aligned with the Plan S principles for cOAlition S funders to support Open Access for academic books within their wider Open Access policies.

While the emphasis made by Plan S on alternative, more sustainable publishing venues and on moving away from OA publishing fees has not directly impacted the developments on the OA publishing landscape for books, the developments in this area are rather well aligned with the Plan S principles. These developments include the setting up of a growing number of university presses in an attempt to regain control of the scholarly publishing by Academia. These university presses and its networks are entering an increasingly contested race for submissions for long-form publications.
Some cOAlition S funders – notably the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the Wellcome Trust, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – are already offering economic support for these long-form publications, often setting funding caps to limit their expenditure. In the case of the latter funder, whose Open Access policy for long-form publications has been examined in section 4.4.2 above, the economic support extends beyond Book Processing Charges (BPCs) and specifically rewards other Open Access publishing routes such as Diamond OA and non-BPC Open Access models [14].

To the extent to which cOAlition S may be able to harmonise its member funders’ OA policies and practices in line with the lessons learnt from the pioneering funder case studies, it could have a significant impact on the Open Access publishing landscape for academic books in the forthcoming years.

## REFERENCES

[1] Stephen Buranyi (2017). "Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?". The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science/

[2] Wikipedia (2017). The Cost of Knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge

[3] Christos Petrou (2023). Guest Post — Reputation and Publication Volume at MDPI and Frontiers. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/09/18/guest-post-reputation-and-publication-volume-at-mdpi-and-frontiers-the-1b-question/

[4] Richard Cave (2012). "Overview of the Altmetrics Landscape". Proceedings of the Charleston Library Conference. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/12982803.pdf

[5] Roheena Anand, Robert Kiley, Anna Vernon (2023). Beyond article-based charges: working group established. cOAlition S blog. https://www.coalition-s.org/beyond-article-based-charges-working-group-established/

[6] cOAlition S (2024). Criteria for Transformative Journals: addendum to the Implementation Guidance for Plan S. https://www.coalition-s.org/addendum-to-the-coalition-s-guidance-on-the-implementation-of-plan-s/

[7] David C Prosser (2003). From here to there: A proposed mechanism for transforming journals from closed to open access. Learned Publishing, 16(3), 163–166. https://doi.org/10.1087/095315103322110923

[8] Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), https://coara.eu/

[9] Paula Clemente Vega (2024). OLH launches 7 new journals. Open Library of Humanities blog. https://www.openlibhums.org/news/700/

[10] cOAlition S (2023). cOAlition S confirms the end of its financial support for Open Access publishing under transformative arrangements after 2024. cOAlition S blog. https://www.coalition-s.org/coalition-s-confirms-the-end-of-its-financial-support-for-open-access-publishing-under-transformative-arrangements-after-2024/

[11] FinELib "Agreement between FinELib and ACS not renewed", https://finelib.fi/agreement-between-finelib-and-acis-not-renewed/

[12] Sally Rumsey (2024). A critique of the Emerald Statement relating to UK rights retention strategies. cOAlition S blog. https://www.coalition-s.org/blog/a-critique-of-the-emerald-statement-relating-to-uk-rights-retention-strategies/

[13] ACS Publications provides a new option to support zero-embargo green open access. https://www.acs.org/pressroom/newsreleases/2023/september/acs-publications-provides-new-option-to-support-zero-embargo-green-open-access.html

[14] UK Research and Innovation (2023). UKRI open access fund for long-form publications: guidance about diamond and non-BPC open access models. https://www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/UKRI-271123-DiamondandNon-BPC-GuidanceforUKRI-OAFundforLongform.pdf
# 5. WHAT PLAN S GOT RIGHT – AND NOT SO RIGHT

As requested in the call for proposals for a study on the impact of Plan S, this section addresses where cOAlition S has been effective and ineffective in meeting its objectives. Two sections follow – called “what Plan S/cOAlition S got right” and “not so right” – where these findings are summarised. The findings mostly arise from interviews with a wide range of relevant stakeholders in the domain of Open Access and scholarly communications more widely (the list of interviewees is available in annex 2).

## 5.1. What Plan S and cOAlition S got right

### 1. Identifying the right levers to pull.

In his notable Dec 2023 "farewell interview", Richard Poynder pointed out that one of the main shortcomings of the Open Access movement was the failure "to establish a central organisation in order to organise and better manage the [Open Access] movement" [1].

While cOAlition S is surely not what he had in mind, the level at which Plan S has addressed the topic is surely the correct one. By making overtures towards the publishers, Plan S and cOAlition S have managed to pull the right levers to make the Open Access landscape move forward.

The actual strategy is not to everybody's liking and there has been inevitable criticism, but an initiative for funders to agree on a common policy towards scholarly communications is a very good starting point.

### 2. The flexibility in the approach.

The main criticism referred to above regards the support of “Eurocentric” Plan S for an inequitable pay-to-publish business model [2], but this is just one of the multiple policy mechanisms available in the Plan S toolbox. While the general direction of Plan S – based on its 10 principles – has remained firm, the flexibility with which it has addressed the challenges raised by the Open Access community as they emerged is also remarkable.

This includes the inclusion of rights retention as a complementary Green OA route to full, immediate Open Access, the new "Towards Responsible Publishing" approach and, even more recently, acknowledging that cOAlition S members will slightly veer away from the joint policy while remaining part of the alliance [3].

This flexibility in exploring innovative approaches could turn out to be one of the strengths of the initiative going forward.

### 3. Paying attention to the issues beyond the geographic area strictly covered by cOAlition S members (WHO and the EC notwithstanding).

The issues around Open Access and the Global South have specifically been explored in a previous section of this report. This is a notoriously difficult challenge to address (see item 2.3 below) but the sheer attempts at defining (among others) a globally fair pricing model and at striving for a diversity of perspectives within the cOAlition S group is also a good approach.
This falls within a wider 'success' of Plan S and cOAlition S in closely listening to the abundant feedback the initiative has prompted [4] and tweaking its design to meet some of the criticism.

4. A clear and inclusive communication strategy.

From the very announcement of Plan S, the communications activity conducted by cOAlition S has been comprehensive, accurate and inclusive. This mainly refers to the information provided on its website, but also on social media.

Particularly commendable is the fact that this communication strategy hasn't been limited to cOAlition S initiatives - all of which have been thoroughly explained and disseminated - but also to related developments in the scholarly communications landscape not directly arising from its own activities.

Offering its sOApbox blog to external - if aligned - initiatives such as the University of Göttingen's Hybrid Open Access Dashboard (HOAD) [5], the University of Edinburgh's Institutional Rights Retention Policy [6] or Sally Rumsey's comment on the Open Access policy for the REF2029 in the United Kingdom [7] has raised the cOAlition S website to the level of an international Open Access observatory. This alone would justify recommendation #1 in chapter 6 below for cOAlition S to keep running beyond 2025.

5.2. What Plan S and cOAlition S did not get so right

1. Researchers are largely unaware of the initiative.

Surveying researchers on the topic of scholarly communications and specifically on Plan S is a very ambitious challenge. Any evidence collected in this regard is bound to be biased, both geographically and from a disciplinary perspective. However, the daily exchanges the authors of this study hold with academics within their Open Access support duties show that the level of awareness of Plan S among researchers is very low.

Funded researchers often know how relevant Open Access is for their funders since they see the notifications for Open Access policy updates that are sent to them, but they heavily rely on their institutional Open Access support services for the practical implementation of such policies.

The Open Access landscape is arguably becoming too complex for researchers to be able to keep track of it. Aware of the fact that there is not much that funders can do to address this issue, the list of recommendations below includes a suggestion for the institutional Open Access implementation network to become more distributed in order to sit closer to researchers.

2. Plan S is too top-down and 'abstract'.

This is closely related to item 2.1 and partially explains the issue around lack of awareness. Even among institutional Open Access advocates interviewed for this study, the link between the Plan S policies and their national-level context remains tenuous. The fact that specific funders may not wish to present their Open Access policies as a direct consequence of a "European" initiative adds to this perception of abstractness. Like the rest of the items in this "not so right" category, this is a structural shortcoming.

The organisation of a rights retention conference as included in the recommendations could provide a means to at least partially address this issue, but previous international events like the 2023 Global Summit on Diamond Open Access in Toluca [8] show that cOAlition S may be comfortable with its role of "galvanising the Open Access community" without necessarily taking ownership of the progress achieved.
3. Spreading itself too thin.

The three big challenges the Open Access movement faces – accessibility, affordability and equity – may well not be simultaneously solvable. There is probably no alternative to trying to fix all issues at once, as they are all interconnected, but the sheer ambition of the endeavour is bound to limit the degree to which policy interventions may be effective. It could be useful to try to assess the progress in each of these dimensions separately on the basis of a survey with its results presented in a radar chart able to capture the evolution in time.

4. Failure to bring more funders on board.

The number of organisations represented in cOAlition S has steadily grown from the 12 members at the time Plan S was first announced in 2018 to the current 28 at the time of writing. However, there are whole regions in the world with no representation – Far East Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America/Caribbean in particular. This inevitably impacts the credibility of the discourse around equitable publishing.

This lack of engagement may be due to a perception that Plan S policies are too expensive, too rigid and not that well aligned with the needs of specific regional Open Access landscapes, but much of this would no longer apply as the initiative moves onto a new phase.

Recommendation #5 in chapter 6 below addresses this shortcoming.

REFERENCES

[1] Rick Anderson (2023). Where Did the Open Access Movement Go Wrong?: An Interview with Richard Poynder. Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/12/07/where-did-the-open-access-movement-go-wrong-an-interview-with-richard-poynder/

[2] Richard Poynder (2019). "Plan S and the Global South – What do countries in the Global South stand to gain from signing up to Europe’s open access strategy?". LSE Impact Blog. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/03/06/plan-s-and-the-global-south-what-do-countries-in-the-global-south-stand-to-gain-from-signing-up-to-europes-open-access-strategy/

[3] Mariana Lenharo (2024). Will the Gates Foundation's preprint-centric policy help open access? Nature News. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00996-8

[4] cOAlition S blog (2019). Feedback on the Implementation Guidance of Plan S Generates Large Public Response. https://www.coalition-s.org/feedback-on-the-implementation-guidance-of-plan-s-generates-large-public-response/

[5] Inke Achterberg, Najko Jahn (2023). "Introducing the Hybrid Open Access Dashboard (HOAD)". cOAlition S blog. https://www.coalition-s.org/blog/introducing-the-hybrid-open-access dashboard-hoad/

[6] Theo Andrew (2022). "Our policy is an affirmation that the University of Edinburgh fully supports authors in their open access practices". cOAlition S blog. https://www.coalition-s.org/blog/university-of-edinburgh-research-publications-copyright-policy/

[7] Sally Rumsey (2024). "Critique of "Open excess: remove open access burden from REF"". cOAlition S blog. https://www.coalition-s.org/blog/critique-of-open-excess-remove-open-access-burden-from-ref/

[8] Oct 23-27, 2023. Global Summit on Diamond Open Access in Toluca, Mexico, https://globaldiamantoa.org/en/home-2/
# 6. RECOMMENDATIONS

A number of recommendations have been identified in the course of the study on the impact of Plan S – both from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. These are mostly addressed to cOAlition S funders, though they include frequent references to other stakeholders in the scholarly communications community. The fifteen recommendations that follow are divided in two areas : for cOAlition S and for other stakeholders. A cross-cutting theme in many of them is the need for a sustained collaboration – both at a national and an international level – with relevant actors in the landscape.

These recommendations arise from various sources: the key views expressed by a wide range of interviewees from all relevant stakeholders in the domain – institutional Open Access advocates, librarians, researchers, consortia, funders and publishers. On top of these, a significant amount of desk research has been conducted. Finally, the wide experience of the authors of the study in the scholarly communications domain has added to the analysis.

## Recommendations for cOAlition S

1. Keep cOAlition S running beyond 2025. A significant progress has been achieved in the push towards full, immediate Open Access since Plan S was first announced. The alliance of research funders that cOAlition S represents has proved to be an influential stakeholder in fostering an international conversation on the best possible ways to achieve accessibility, affordability and equity in scholarly publishing. The effort should persist, periodically taking stock on the objectives achieved thus far.

2. Support initiatives to reform research assessment. Several projects and initiatives are currently exploring this key area for researchers to be able to diversify their choice of publishing venues. There should be ways for cOAlition S to throw its weight behind these efforts, both by cOAlition S-member funders individually getting involved in initiatives like the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) or by cOAlition S as a whole supporting this or other like-minded projects like GraspOS<fnref n="23" />.

3. Support innovative and equitable publishing models and venues such as Diamond Open Access and Open Research platforms. A lot has already been done to promote Diamond OA, but the effort needs to persist – or even increase – beyond project-driven initiatives once these come to an end. Future progress should include devising mechanisms to accurately monitor the uptake of this model for cOAlition S-funded publications. Open Research Platforms – and specifically Open Research Europe (ORE) – should gain more prominence, as their uptake remains significantly below their potential and is not being as well monitored as it could. Moreover, the instances where the ORE is being used to support whole research communities remain underexposed<fnref n="24" />. If they intend to

<footnote n="23">²³ GraspOS: next Generation Research Assessment to Promote Open Science, https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101095129</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ See for instance the “Women on the Move” Open Research Europe community at https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/collections/women-on-the-move/about offering a home for the Université de Picardie Jules Verne-led WEMov COST action CA19112 with the same name. The project website shows the worldwide network behind this COST Action, https://www.womenonthemove.eu/whos-who/#participants, and while the ORE collection only contains two publications at the time of writing, the fact that it's been launched would suggest a potential for growth</footnote>
have any chance at competing, these alternative publishing venues need to be much more
proactive in this domain.

One specifically suggested way to support such innovative and equitable publishing models and venues is for cOAlition S funders to introduce a narrative section in the project reporting devoted to (the Principal Investigator) explaining how the project team have approached the general guidance on publishing their results responsibly.

4. Establish a narrative that connects the pre-and post-31 Dec 2024 stages of Plan S. The exploration and adoption of the strategies that will enable the practical implementation of the Towards Responsible Publishing (TRP) approach as released in October 2023 should not supplant the previous objectives of Plan S. The announced discontinuation of the economic support for transformative arrangements by the end of 2024 will also mean an opportunity for Plan S to focus on more sustainable and equitable models. It is important however to try and manage a smooth transition between both stages of the initiative.

5. Explore the feasibility of expanding the reach of cOAlition S into new geographical areas. This needn't be by having new funders in underrepresented geographies like Latin America or Far East Asia formally joining cOAlition S, but some more informal mechanisms – such as MoUs – could perhaps be found to bring new stakeholders under the cOAlition S umbrella for the purpose of harmonising the approach to Open Access implementation worldwide<fnref n="25" />. At a time when countries like Japan are devising their strategy to implement a mandatory national Open Access policy<fnref n="26" />, having the necessary international coordination mechanisms in place would be highly advisable despite the non-negligible increase in organisational complexity.

6. Keep working as closely as possible with national and regional consortia. There are inspiring examples already for this close collaboration between national funder and national consortium. More can and should be done in this regard, from exploring new mechanisms such as *subscribe to open* or other funding models for community-owned journal titles to improving Read & Publish agreements.

7. Step up the communications-related effort of cOAlition S. This is mainly for the purpose of showcasing best practices in the adoption of new models of publishing, particularly by researchers (but also by consortia and institutions if/where applicable). At a time when much discussion is taking place on how to best acknowledge contributions by researchers in line with the Open Science principles, the adequate dissemination of pioneering strategies in the publication of their research outputs should have a place in this area. Not all the communications effort needs to sit with cOAlition S – this is yet another area where an agile, effective collaboration with consortia and institutions in different countries would simplify the task.

8. Collaborate with Open Access monitors or any other initiatives to measure Open Access policy compliance. Annex 3 below shows various initiatives under development that may eventually be able to provide accurate rates of compliance with Plan S-aligned OA policies issued by cOAlition S funders. Gradually reaching the ability to provide those indicators – ideally on the basis of data provided by open bibliographic data sources – constitutes a key advance for the purpose of assessing the impact of Plan S, and it is one that this report can unfortunately only hint at since these instruments remain largely underdeveloped at the time of writing. Critically, as shown in annex 3, in most cases Plan S-aligned OA policy compliance rates can only be produced in close

<footnote n="25">²⁵ The interviews have cast light on organisations like the [African] Science Granting Councils, https://sgciafrica.org/science-granting-councils/, who fully support the Plan S principles but show some reluctance to join cOAlition S due to “operational complexities”. Partnerships with such organisations not necessarily including formal membership of cOAlition S could be considered.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Dalmeet Singh Chawla (2024). "Japan's push to make all research open access is taking shape". Nature News. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01493-8</footnote>
collaboration with the funders behind such policies. It is important however that these figures
eventually become publicly available as part of the information on the general progress in Open
Access implementation that these national Open Access monitors provide.

9. Promote international collaboration around rights retention policies. An international event should be considered to showcase best practices in various countries – including the adoption of secondary publication rights – and to promote a harmonised approach internationally. Finding ways to monitor the uptake of such policies should ideally be part of this effort, to be undertaken in collaboration with national Open Access monitors and based on open bibliographic data sources. These should in turn develop the capacity to provide reliable data in this specific domain.

If a specifically devoted conference were too ambitious an objective, then support the organisation of strands on the topic within more general events – LIBER conferences being an evident (if not the only) candidate in this regard in view of the key role played by LIBER within the Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) initiative<fnref n="27" />.

10. Introduce a 'responsible publishing' section in the project reporting requirements. This section should provide a narrative explanation on how the project team have approached the general guidance on publishing their results responsibly<fnref n="28" />.

11. Re-run the study on the impact of Plan S in 5-10 years' time. A consistent finding from both the quantitative and the qualitative side of this study is that it's too early to accurately measure the impact of policies that haven't yet had time to make their distinct mark on the scholarly communications landscape. Some key national funders within cOAlition S haven't yet managed to have their Plan S-aligned Open Access policy passed – and could as a consequence not be included in the quantitative analysis despite the authors' certainty that their move will make a big difference when it happens.

General recommendations for all stakeholders involved in the appropriate scholarly
communication workflows

12. Identify and disseminate best practices in reallocating research literature budgets by libraries. Examples of such best practices in this area have surfaced in the course of the interviews but the awareness of these is currently very low as they're only starting to emerge. Both the gradual shifts in the read/publish splits in agreements with publishers and the odd cancellation of subscriptions are generating savings that libraries are afraid to lose from their institutions if the money is not quickly spent elsewhere. National and/or regional consortia may be best placed to highlight mechanisms for libraries to retain their institutional funding and invest these savings in more sustainable and equitable publishing models, but only cOAlition S can adequately emphasise the international nature of these developments as a consequence of the impact of Plan S.

<footnote n="27">²⁷ LIBER (2023). LIBER Actions on Secondary Publishing Rights – KR21 Year in Review. https://libereurope.eu/article/liber-actions-on-secondary-publishing-rights-kr21-year-in-review/</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Some cOAlition S funders already have reporting sections devoted to publications and outcomes where this section could be added, https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FN019474%2F1#/tabOverview</footnote>
13. Promote a more distributed Open Access support network at institutions that involves researcher representatives. Same as the research data management (RDM) domain has seen the gradual adoption of institutional data stewards often recruited among data-minded scientists (often ECRs) already at the institution, it's strongly recommended for institutional Open Access services to try and train specific researchers *within departments and research groups* so that the Open Access policy awareness can sit closer to where the research is conducted. This is also aimed at relieving some of the pressures inevitably building on these institutional Open Access support teams as a result of their need to implement and monitor an ever increasing number of labour-intensive Open Access policy mechanisms (such as transformative agreements and rights retention policies).

<figure><img src="image_34.png" /></figure>

14. Devise mechanisms to increase the value of transformative agreements. Read & Publish agreements represent a key development in the current Open Access landscape. Efforts to make them more efficient for the benefit of public-sector research-performing organisations (including research funders) are ongoing, but the progress is very uneven across countries. From the inclusion of rights retention clauses in their wording to the definition of indicators to measure how equitable they may be<fnref n="29" />, there are areas where the value of these agreements could increase. A first step would be to have a set of internationally harmonised criteria to assess the value of these deals<fnref n="30" />.

15. Devise and implement mechanisms to secure ownership of new publicly-owned or - supported ventures in the scholarly communications landscape. This applies particularly to new Diamond OA titles or those brought under the support of community-based funding schemes, but also to tools and services developed with a significant amount of public funding.

"I'm not sure that libraries will manage to keep the funding [arising from cancellations] everywhere. What we did in our university was we set up a project. So the cancelled deal is €200,000 per year. And then we built a project for expanding Open Science in all topics, software, research data, Diamond, and so on, which is €400,000. And we said to the university, OK, we can fund this project, half of it, by cutting a subscription. And then we have to find the remaining part elsewhere, like it could be different sources of funding. So we included the savings in a project that was not just money that the library could use, I don't know, maybe to buy some books or to subscribe to another publisher. We really wanted to include it in a project where the university governance could see, OK, it will be used for this, this, this, and that for the next three years"

(Open Science Expert)

<footnote n="29">²⁹ The recent update delivered by the cOAlition S “Beyond article charges” working group hints at additional equity-related criteria that could be used to assess the value of transformative agreements. On top of this there are pioneering frameworks to evaluate R&P deals devised by the STAR team at the University California that could serve as a template.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ There are already some criteria to assess the value of Read & Publish agreements, see https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/working-with-transitional-agreements, but these are very expenditure-focused and fail to assess the scientific value that R&P deals provide to research-performing organisations. They do also not include (yet) the indicators to measure equity.</footnote>
# 7. ANNEXES

## ANNEX 1: OPEN BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA SOURCES

As requested by cOAlition S, all data and source code underpinning the Counterfactual Impact Evaluation is openly available under a CC BY license in Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12523229. The list of datasets is provided below with a brief description of its content.

Note: While the datasets contain funded publications published in the period 2013-2023 for all research funders included in the CIE, an early examination of the annual figures resulted in the removal of the publications for 2013 and 2014 for the purpose of the quantitative analysis. See section «Establishing the timeframe for the analysis» in chapter 4 on the CIE for more details.

<table><thead><tr><td>File Name</td><td>Content</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>anid.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the Chilean ANID/CONICYT published in 2013-2023</td></tr><tr><td>china13.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) published in 2013</td></tr><tr><td>china14.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the NSFC published in 2014</td></tr><tr><td>china15.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the NSFC published in 2015</td></tr><tr><td>china16.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the NSFC published in 2016</td></tr><tr><td>china17.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the NSFC published in 2017</td></tr><tr><td>china18.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the NSFC published in 2018</td></tr><tr><td>china19.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the NSFC published in 2019</td></tr><tr><td>china20.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the NSFC published in 2020</td></tr><tr><td>china21.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the NSFC published in 2021</td></tr><tr><td>china22.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the NSFC published in 2022</td></tr><tr><td>china23.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the NSFC published in 2023</td></tr><tr><td>dfg.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the German Research Foundation (DFG) published in 2013-2023</td></tr><tr><td>fwf.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in 2013-2023</td></tr><tr><td>fwo_flanders.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the Flemish Research Council (FWO) in 2013-2023</td></tr><tr><td>hhmi.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in 2013-2023</td></tr><tr><td>MBIE.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) in 2013-2023</td></tr><tr><td>nci.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the United States in 2013-2023</td></tr><tr><td>ncn.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the Polish National Centre for Science (NCN) in 2013-2023</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><tr><td>nwo.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in 2013-2023</td></tr><tr><td>ukri.csv</td><td>Funded publications by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in the United Kingdom in 2013-2023</td></tr><tr><td>plan_s.dta</td><td>Full dataset with all covariates and preprocessing done</td></tr><tr><td>data_prep_and_analysis_script.do</td><td>Full data preparation and regression analysis</td></tr><tr><td>coefplots_script.R</td><td>Supplementary file to generate the plots based on the regression results computed in the previous file</td></tr></table>
ANNEX 2: LIST OF INTERVIEWEES AND OTHER
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A good deal of knowledgeable professionals representing various stakeholders – institutional Open Access teams, university libraries and research centres, researchers, university consortia, publishers and funders – have kindly offered their time and their thoughts in the process of compiling the qualitative assessment for the impact of Plan S. The list of their names is provided below with our gratitude for their collaboration.

The thirtysomething participants in recorded 1-hr interviews without whom the qualitative analysis wouldn't have been possible:

* Theo ANDREW (University of Edinburgh, UK)

* Chris BANKS (Imperial College London, UK)

* Chris BENNETT (Cambridge University Press)

* Laura BONALD/Tony ROCHE (Emerald, UK)

* Sarah BOSSHART (Royal Society of Chemistry, UK)

* Niamh BRENNAN (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

* Colleen CAMPBELL (Max Planck Digital Library, Germany)

* Anna CLEMENTS (University of Sheffield, UK)

* Gilles DUBOCHET (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne-EPFL, Switzerland)

* Brian GODMAN (University of Strathclyde, UK)

* Najko JAHN (Universität Göttingen, Germany)

* Iryna KUCHMA (EIFL, Ukraine)

* Stephan KUSTER (Frontiers, Switzerland)

* Ignasi LABASTIDA (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain)

* Sharla LAIR (Lyrasis, United States)

* Émilie LAVALLÉE-FUNSTON (University of Stirling, UK)

* Jean François LUTZ (Université de Lorraine, France)

* Leila MOORE/Ralf SCHIMMER (Wiley)

* Patricia MUÑOZ PALMA (ANID, Chile)

* Kamran NAIM (CERN, Switzerland)

* Ritsuko NAKAJIMA (Japan Science and Technology Agency-JST, Japan)

* Cameron NEYLON (Curtin University, Australia)

* Susanna NYKIRI (Tampere University, Finland)

* Faranah OSMAN (National Research Foundation, South Africa)

* Josmel PACHECO MENDOZA (Ministerio de Educación del Perú-MINEDU, Peru)

* César PALLARÉS (Consorcio Colombia)

* Agnès PONSATI/Mercedes BAQUERO (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-CSIC, Spain)

* Pilar RICO CASTRO (FECYT, Spain)
* Catherine SHARP (University College London, UK)

* Vitalija STEPUŠAITYTĖ (Scottish Rural College, UK)

* Marco TULLNEY (TIB Hannover, Germany)

* Demy VERBEKE (KU Leuven, Belgium)

* Anna VERNON (Jisc, UK)

The staff at various research funders (both coAlition S funders and otherwise) who agreed to hold unrecorded, informal conversations with us:

* Zoé ANCION (Agence nationale de la recherche-ANR, France)

* Angela HOLZER (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-DFG, Germany)

* Joana NOVAIS/João MOREIRA/Miguel ANDRADE (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia-FCT, Portugal)

* Katharina RIECK (FWF-Austrian Science Fund, Austria)

* Michael STRASSNIG (WWTF-Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds, Austria)

* Oliver WRIGHT/Morag CAMPBELL (Scottish Funding Council-SFC, UK)

Those experts who kindly agreed to informally discuss the topic of Plan S with us without being included in the official list of interviewees

The organisers of and participants in several very useful seminars and workshops

* Multiple activities on rights retention policies in the UK organised by the Jisc, SCONUL, the N8 research partnership and other stakeholders

* Dec 1st, 2024 Workshop “Insight into research negotiations” held by the Jisc's Sarah Roughley Barake and Lesley Maw at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow

* Apr 9th, 2024 OASPA webinar on the impact of Plan S (and other OASPA webinars, the Pathfinder series in particular)

* Apr 17th, 2024 CESAER Workshop on financial implications of the transition to open access at Aalto University in Espoo and online

* May 16th, 2024 AT2OA2 Workshop “CRIS Data: Potential and Challenges for Open Access Monitoring and Negotiations” at the CRIS2024 conference held at the TU Wien in Vienna
# ANNEX 3: PLAN S OPEN ACCESS POLICY COMPLIANCE

Monitoring compliance of research publications with Plan S-aligned Open Access policies issued by cOAlition S funders remains a challenge at the time of writing. There are however significant recent advances in the area, some of which are presented here.

Some of the limitations that make it very difficult to measure the impact of Plan S on the basis of a quantitative analysis alone have been pointed out in the chapter 3. The two main ones are:

1. It's still too early to gather a conclusive snapshot of research publications subject to Plan S-aligned Open Access policies. This is largely due to the uneven timeframe for their coming into force across cOAlition S funders. The [Plan S] implementation roadmap of cOAlition S organisations<fnref n="31" /> shows a range of kick-off dates – and critically, also of criteria – for the adoption of their Plan S-aligned Open Access policies. This is summarised in the tables below.

<table><caption>Table A.3.1. List of cOAlition S funders who've used the date of funding calls as a kick-off date for their Plan S-aligned Open Access policy</caption><thead><tr><th>All new funding calls opened after 1 Jan 2021</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Academy of Finland (AKA)</td></tr><tr><td>European Commission (Horizon Europe Framework Programme)</td></tr><tr><td>Formas (Sweden)</td></tr><tr><td>French National Research Agency (ANR)</td></tr><tr><td>Higher Council for Science and Technology (HCST, Jordan)</td></tr><tr><td>Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)</td></tr><tr><td>National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN, Italy)</td></tr><tr><td>National Science and Technology Council (NSTC, Zambia)</td></tr><tr><td>National Science Centre, Poland (NCN)</td></tr><tr><td>Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)</td></tr><tr><td>Research Council of Norway (RCN)</td></tr><tr><td>Vinnova (Sweden)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Using a cut-off date based on the date of issuing of new funding calls is the most frequent approach among cOAlition S funders, even if just under half of them have chosen this approach. A kick-off date based on new funding calls introduces a significant delay in the expected date of publication for the first research outputs subject to the policy: a broad estimation would be one year until the first grants are awarded within the call and another year until the first publications from these grants subject to Plan S-aligned policies start to be published. A 2-year delay applied from 1 January 2021 takes us to the end of 2022, which means that the post-Plan S time-window for funded publications the Counterfactual Impact Evaluation above has applied (2021-2023) would contain a limited number of "Plan S publications". Among the funders on the table above, only the Polish NCN and the Dutch NWO are part of the treatment group, so this effect may be ignored provided the appropriate caveats are kept in mind when examining the results.

Some other cOAlition S funders – although far fewer – have chosen to base the cut-off date for their Plan S-aligned policy on the dates when grants are awarded. When this cut-off date is 1 January 2021, this approach shortens the period of time needed for the first publications to appear that are subject to the Plan S-aligned OA policy by one full year, meaning first "Plan S publications" by the end of 2021. Given that the FWF are also in the treatment group, it's reassuring they are in this category. However, other

<footnote n="31">³¹ https://www.coalition-s.org/plan-s-funders-implementation/</footnote>
cOAlition S funders who have used the “date of grant awarding” as a criteria for their cut-off date have much later adoption dates for their Plan S-aligned OA policies, see table A.3.2 below. This means very few publications to be used as a basis for a comprehensive cross-funder compliance analysis.

<table><caption>Table A.3.2. List of cOAlition S funders who've used the date of grant awarding as a kick-off date criteria for their Plan S-aligned Open Access policy. Note the variation on the kick-off dates across funders</caption><thead><tr><th colspan="5">All new grants awarded after</th></tr><tr><th>1 Jan 2021</th><th>1 Jul 2022</th><th>20 Sep 2022</th><th>1 Jan 2023</th><th>1 Jan 2024</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Austrian Science Fund (FWF)</td><td>Québec Research</td><td>National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC, Australia) – under NHMRC Grant</td><td>Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)</td><td>National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC, Australia) – all other NHMRC grants</td></tr><tr><td>FORTE (Sweden)</td><td>Funds (QRF)/ Fonds de Recherche du Québec (FRQ)</td><td>Opportunity Guidelines</td><td></td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

Finally, another sizeable fraction of cOAlition S funders has used the *date of (funded) manuscript submission* as a criteria – these are shown on table A.3.3 below. This is the quickest way for publications subject to Plan S-aligned OA policies to arise that can be monitored for compliance.

<table><caption>Table A.3.3. List of cOAlition S funders who've used the date of manuscript submission as a kick-off date criteria for their Plan S-aligned Open Access policy</caption><tbody><tr><th colspan="2">All research articles submitted for publication from 1 Jan 2021</th></tr><tr><td>Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Wellcome Trust</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>World Health Organization (WHO)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR)</td><td></td></tr><tr><th colspan="2">All research articles submitted for publication from 1 Jan 2022</th></tr><tr><td>Aligning Science Across Parkinson's (ASAP)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)</td><td></td></tr><tr><th colspan="2">All research articles submitted for publication from 1 Apr 2022</th></tr><tr><td>United Kingdom Research & Innovation (UKRI)</td><td></td></tr><tr><th colspan="2">No Plan S-aligned policy yet</th></tr><tr><td>Foundation for Science and Technology of Portugal (FCT)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS)</td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

Even if the cut-off date again varies across cOAlition S funders, it may take as little as a few months for the first “Plan S publications” to be published<fnref n="32" />. It's subsequently these funders who may provide the basis for a more reliable attempt at monitoring compliance with their Plan S-aligned OA policies at the time of writing.

<footnote n="32">³² The first University of Strathclyde article published under route 2 (rights retention strategy) of the UKRI Plan S-aligned OA policy applicable to funded manuscripts submitted from 1 April 2022 was first released online on 1 September 2022, https://x.com/pcastromartin/status/1565263103260250112. This means a remarkably shorter **5-month time-window** after the Plan S-aligned policy came into force compared to the other criteria above.</footnote>
2. There are **possible data quality issues** in the data sources used to gather the information on publications and their Open Access status. These are currently not sufficiently sophisticated to capture the nuances of Plan S-aligned Open Access policies. The fact that the attempt to measure the Open Access status – which for Plan S compliance includes Creative Commons or other open licences as a key criterion – of publications that may be subject Plan S-aligned OA policies coincides with the attempt to gradually move away from proprietary, commercially exploited data sources is an additional source of complexity. Commendable as this latter attempt is, it potentially introduces data quality issues, particularly in relation to the widespread lack of funding information in platforms that are still to some extent being perfected. This is bound to improve with time, especially as research funders engage with the new open data sources to contribute to an increased reliability in this area. It is however still too early from this perspective to collect a comprehensive snapshot of cross-funder Plan S-aligned OA policy compliance.

All this said, there are numerous initiatives to monitor the evolution of the Open Access landscape, often at a national level. These national Open Access monitors also have different dates of implementation and a variable degree of comprehensiveness and sophistication. These are also very valuable instruments for addressing the challenges of monitoring the adoption of Plan S-aligned OA policies. Some informal coordination across initiatives both within their national borders – for instance making sure the national research funder is at least to some extent involved in the data gathering and in the analysis processes – and internationally would be advisable to make sure that methodologies and results are reasonably well aligned across countries.

* Austrian Open Access Monitor (German-language-only), https://oamonitor.obvsg.at/

* Dutch UKB Datahub (under construction), https://ukb.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/UKBSis-English.pdf

* French Open Access monitor, https://frenchopensciencemonitor.esr.gouv.fr/

* German Open Access monitor, https://open-access-monitor.de/

* National Open Access Monitor Ireland, https://oamonitor.ireland.openaire.eu/

* Swiss Open Access Monitor, https://oamonitor.ch/

* Catalan Open Access Observatory, https://bibliotecnica.upc.edu/en/observatory

Some funders are already closely working with their national Open Access monitors to capture a snapshot of the Open Access breakdown for their funded publications, see an example below for the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) based on the French Open Access Monitor.
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) : Open access rate of publications resulting from the HAL collection from ANR, with a Crossref DOI, by opening routes and by year of publication, compared to all French publications

<figure><img src="image_35.png" /><figcaption>Hosting type</figcaption></figure>

French Open Science Monitor

Data updated the Dec 1, 2022

Sources: Unpaywall, HAL, MESR, Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)

The progress by these various Open Access
monitors in capturing the rates of compliance
with Plan S-aligned OA policies adopted by their
national funders will eventually offer a valuable
additional snapshot on the impact of Plan S.

<figure><img src="image_36.png" /></figure>

"Plan S itself hasn't, the funders
themselves, haven't, to my mind, done
a great job of monitoring the
implementation of their own policies.
And this actually tends to be a general
problem with funders"

(Open Science Expert)
# ANNEX 4: GLOSSARY

Glossary of relevant terms in the domain of Open Access in the context of this report. Definitions are occasionally complemented with a brief comment on how the term relates to its use in the report.

**Accepted Author Manuscript (AAM).** Version of a research publication – typically a journal article – that arises upon final acceptance by a publisher of a manuscript submitted for publication once the peer review process has been completed. This version will usually carry no publisher branding on it yet and is the one that gets deposited in Open Access repositories at no cost for the author(s). AAMs are also known as postprints.

[See also: Version of Record (VoR)]

**Article Processing Charge (APC).** Fee charged by publishers to make the final published version of a research work Open Access on the publication venue (typically – but not always – a research journal). APCs may be *mandatory* when a journal operates under a fully Open Access business model with no subscription charges or *optional* when the journal is a so-called ‘hybrid’, meaning it remains anchored to the subscription model whereby institutions need to pay a subscription or read fee to provide their hired researchers and professional services with access to the research literature.

APCs are usually paid by research funders or, for unfunded publications, by institutions, but when none of these options is available, authors will occasionally pay them from their own pocket to benefit from the increased visibility that Gold OA provides to the published version of a paper. Plan S specifically states in principle 4 that authors should not directly pay these charges themselves.

When this processing charge applies to books, it's called BPC (Book Processing Charge). When it applies to book chapters it's known as Chapter Processing Charge (CPC).

[See also: Book Processing Charge (BPC), Gold OA]

**Book Processing Charge (BPC).** Fee charged by publishers to make the final published version of a book Open Access on their website.

[See also: Article Processing Charge (APC)]

**Bronze OA.** Also known as free-to-read, this business model involves paywalls being removed by publishers for specific articles so that no subscription is required to access them. Since these are typically not published under an open licence, Bronze OA doesn't really qualify as Open Access and is hence a misnomer, but the terminology has stuck and is widely used. Publishers agreed for instance to “open” all articles related to Covid-19 research during the recent pandemic, but there is generally no commitment for these Bronze OA publications to remain free to read over time.

**Chapter Processing Charge (CPC).** Fee charged by publishers to make the final published version of a book chapter Open Access on their website.

[See also: Article Processing Charge (APC)]

**Closed access.** Business model for research publishing that relies on the payment of subscription fees in order to be able to read the research literature. Any reader who lacks a subscription typically needs to pay a fee to access a closed access research publication. This was the predominant model before the Open Access movement emerged and remains in place for large swathes of the scholarly communications landscape.

[See also: Subscription journal]
**cOAlition S.** A group of national research funding organisations established in September 2018 with the aim of promoting full immediate Open Access for research publications in line with the Plan S principles. In its first five years, cOAlition S has grown from a dozen to 28 funders, extending beyond Europe and into the Americas, Africa and Australia.

[See also: Plan S]

**Control group.** Group of observations deemed not to have been affected by a given intervention. In a clinical trial, the control group is formed of the subjects who've been given a placebo. In the context of this study, the control group is composed of the publications funded by research funders assumed to have experienced very little or no impact of Plan S.

[See also: *Treatment group, Difference-in-differences (DiD)*]

**Counterfactual Impact Evaluation (CIE).**

Analysis to quantitatively assess the impact of a given policy intervention on the basis of a comparison between what actually happened and what would have happened in the absence of the intervention. In the context of this study, the policy intervention is Plan S.

[See also: *Difference-in-differences (DiD)*]

**Creative Commons (CC) licence.** Public copyright licence that allows the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted publication, typically a research publication for the purpose of this report. CC licences enable authors to give readers the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. There are several types of Creative Commons licences, potentially including limitations in the form of non-commercial or non-derivative clauses. These clauses specify the terms of distribution. Thus CC licences remove users' concerns on potential copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions specified in the licence.

[See also: *Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence*]

**Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.** A specific type of Creative Commons licence where the sole requirement for the reuse of a given work is the attribution to its creator(s). A CC BY licence allows the work to be distributed, remixed, adapted and built upon in any medium or format, including for commercial use, as long as attribution is given to the author(s). Principle 1 (of 10) of Plan S states that "all publications must be published under an open licence, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY)".

[See also: *Creative Commons (CC) licence*]

**Current Research Information Systems (CRIS).** Institutional databases where information is stored describing the research activity carried out at the organisation. This typically includes – among many other elements – metadata on research outputs and its publishing costs.

**Diamond OA.** Free-to-read, free-to-publish Open Access business model often operated from within academic environments. Diamond Open Access journals need resources to ensure some basic technical publishing standards and to adequately process their submissions. To cover their operational costs, these journals are frequently subsidised by research-performing organisations, research funders, learned societies or other actors. Diamond OA is also the business model behind overlay journals and some open research platforms launched by funders like the Wellcome Trust, the European Commission or the Gates Foundation.

[See also: *Gold OA, Overlay journal*]

**Difference-in-differences (DiD).** Statistical technique used in econometrics to replicate the methodology for a scientific experiment – such as clinical trial – into the social sciences, with similar treatment and control groups. For this study, the treatment is Plan S as a policy
instrument to achieve full, immediate Open Access. DiD-based approaches are frequently applied to measure the impact of specific policy interventions, especially in the realm of labour- and health-related policies.

[See also: *Treatment group, Control group*]

**Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).**
List of fully OA journals available worldwide that meet the strict quality criteria enforced by the directory. The DOAJ is an independent, non-profit organisation managed by Infrastructure Services for Open Access C.I.C. (IS4OA), a community interest company registered in the United Kingdom and with a branch in Denmark. The directory includes APC-based and Diamond OA journals, since what matters for being listed is technical publishing criteria such as open licences or the issuing of DOIs.

[See also: *Predatory publishing*]

**Double-dipping.** A double payment phenomenon whereby institutions simultaneously pay to access the literature via the subscription model and via optional APCs for articles published in hybrid journals. These double payments were originally addressed via reimbursements by some publishers, but ultimately led to the emergence of Read & Publish agreements. By gradually shifting the breakdown between the read and the publish fee, these agreements are seen as key instruments to enable the transition away from the subscription model and into a full, immediate Open Access landscape.

[See also: *Hybrid journal, Hybrid OA, Read & Publish agreements*]

**Embargo period.** A period of time during which an accepted author manuscript (AAM) or postprint cannot be made freely available from an Open Access repository. Embargo periods for journal articles are specified by journal and publisher in the SHERPA RoMEO database and are typically 12 months for STM and 18-24 months for SSH disciplines. Embargo periods are the result of a compromise between publishers and research-performing

organisations to allow the final published versions or Versions of Record (VoRs) to be commercially distributed by publishers. Embargo periods usually apply from the date of first online release of a publication, although this may vary across publishers. There has been significant resistance over the years against embargo periods from authors, institutions and research funders. In its pursuit of immediate Open Access, Plan S has subsequently defined a route for accepted manuscripts to be immediately made openly available under no embargo period and an open licence – this is the so-called rights retention strategy.

[See also: *Green OA, Accepted Author Manuscript (AAM)*]

**Fully Gold Open Access.** Subsection of Gold Open Access that excludes subscription (aka hybrid) titles. As opposed to hybrid, where Open Access is optional, a fully Gold OA business model involves mandatory Open Access. This is the business model applied by fully Gold Open Access journals and publishers, which typically (but not always) involves the payment of an Open Access publishing fee or Article Processing Charge (APC). Also known as pure Gold Open Access.

[See also: *Fully Open Access journal, Fully Open Access publisher, Gold OA, Article Processing Charge (APC)*]

**Fully Open Access journal.** Journal that offers Open Access to all its contents *while charging no subscription fees*. This means it relies exclusively on (mandatory) Open Access publishing fees (or an equivalent business model) to raise the income necessary to cover its operational costs. This is the business model journals should be evolving towards according to initiatives like OA2020 and Plan S so that a full immediate Open Access landscape may eventually emerge. Diamond OA journals are also fully OA journals without any Open Access publishing costs.

[See also: *Gold OA, Article Processing Charge (APC), Diamond OA*]
**Fully Open Access publisher.** A publisher that publishes only fully OA journals. Publishers like the Public Library of Science (PLoS), BioMed Central (BMC), Hindawi, Frontiers, Ubiquity Press, Versita and MDPI were all founded after the Open Access movement started advocating for a fully open scholarly communications landscape. Many were later acquired by hybrid publishers wishing to increase their fully OA portfolio.

[See also: **Gold OA, Fully Open Access journal, Article Processing Charge (APC)**]

**Gold OA.** Mechanism or route for making research publications Open Access – typically journal articles but also conference papers and books and book chapters – by directly offering OA to the final published version or Version of Record (VoR). While not always the case, Gold OA usually involves the payment of an Open Access publishing fee or Article Processing Charge (APC).

[See also: **Article Processing Charge (APC), Fully Gold Open Access, Hybrid OA, Read & Publish agreement**]

**Green OA.** Mechanism to achieve Open Access to a research publication via the deposit of the full-text accepted manuscript into an institutional system, typically an Open Access repository. The Green OA route is free of charge and typically requires the author(s) to make available this AAM or Author Accepted Manuscript upon manuscript acceptance. The deposit of AAMs may be directly carried out by the researcher (self-archiving) or by some support service to which the AAM has been sent (mediated deposit). Green OA has traditionally been subject to embargo periods.

[See also: **Accepted Author Manuscript (AAM), Open Access repository, Embargo period**]

**Hybrid journal.** Scholarly journals that charge both subscription or 'read' and (optional) publishing fees. These are called hybrid

because they are not fully closed (individual articles can be made Open Access via a payment) and not fully open either. By charging for both reading and publishing, they present a double-dipping issue, the solution to which eventually evolved into Read & Publish agreements. Since its conception the hybrid OA model was supposed to be transitional but it became entrenched in the scholarly communications landscape due to the issues associated with a flip to a fully OA model (an abrupt drop in the number of submissions being the main one).

[See also: **Hybrid OA, Double-dipping, Read & Publish agreement, Transformative journal**]

**Hybrid OA.** Subcategory of Gold OA where Open Access articles are published in so-called hybrid journals, i.e. those that rely on the subscription model while charging fees to selectively offer Open Access to individual articles for which a payment has been made, either via optional APCs or via coverage under (paid-for) Read & Publish agreements. Hybrid OA was originally conceived as a transitional model that would enable journals to gradually 'flip' to fully Open Access business models where no subscription or 'read' charges would be levied anymore. This still ongoing transition has been extraordinarily slow and has prompted calls for other alternative models to be explored.

[See also: **Gold OA, Hybrid journal, Double-dipping**]

**Hybrid publisher.** A publisher whose portfolio includes a large fraction of hybrid journals, i.e. that relies heavily on the traditional subscription business model. All publishers in the “big five” category (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE) are hybrid publishers. The transition to a fully OA landscape is based on trying to persuade hybrid publishers to become fully OA publishers by flipping their titles to a subscription-free model.
[See also: Hybrid journal, Read & Publish agreement]

**Institutional Rights Retention Policy (IRRP).**

While the rights retention strategy as issued by cOAlition S funders only applies to the research publications they fund (i.e. those carrying the appropriate funding acknowledgements to any of their funded projects), institutions in various countries, notably in the United Kingdom, have followed the 2008 Harvard Open Access policy template and expanded the application of rights retention to all the research publications they (or their researchers) produce. This is operationalised by passing IRRPs that apply across the whole institution on the same basis of the funder-driven rights retention strategy, i.e. by researchers at the institution granting a non-exclusive licence to their university to make their publications openly available and to exercise copyright over them.

[See also: Rights Retention Strategy (RRS)]

**Journal Checker Tool (JCT).** Plan S does not intend to tell researchers where to publish and its various, complementary strategies allow its principles to be met via different routes. The JCT is the platform commissioned by cOAlition S and built by Cottage Labs to allow researchers to check what options they have to meet Plan S requirements for a combination of a journal title, a research funder supporting and an institution.

**Journal flipping.** Strategy to gradually switch the scholarly communications landscape from a largely closed access to a full immediate Open Access publishing model. It relies on the gradual transition in business models underpinning scholarly journals from a subscription to a fully Open Access model, transforming hybrid journals into fully OA ones and leaving behind the subscription model for good. Plan S includes criteria for journal flipping once a sufficiently high percentage of Open Access articles in hybrid journals is achieved via Read & Publish or “transformative” agreements. However, the transformation is

largely not happening or happening too slowly, which has prompted cOAlition S to drop their support for this mechanism and for Read & Publish agreements as a whole.

[See also: Read & Publish agreement, Hybrid journal]

**Journal Impact Factor (JIF).** Bibliometric indicator calculated on the basis of the average number of citations received by the articles published in a specific journal. The JIF has traditionally been understood as a proxy for the scientific quality of a journal, although this assumption is strongly contested.

**Library consortia (or University consortia).**

Association of research-performing organisations – usually higher education institutions and research centres – for the purpose of improved and expanded economic collaboration to achieve mutually beneficial goals. In the context of scholarly communications and Open Access, formal entities constituted to support collaborative procurement across research-performing organisations with regard to research literature. Historically engaged in the negotiation of subscriptions to research journals and other scholarly literature, the role of national and regional library consortia has gradually evolved into the negotiation of publishing agreements with research publishers, including Read & Publish agreements. They have subsequently become key actors in the transition towards a full immediate Open Access landscape and direct enablers of the principles of Plan S in practice. While usually not directly involved in negotiations, public research funders like those in cOAlition S often work closely with library consortia. Bodies like the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) bring together over 200 such consortia and provide a forum for much-needed international collaboration in this domain.

[See also: Research funder, cOAlition S, Plan S]
**Long-form publications.** Group of textual document types subject to specific Open Access policies issued by research funders. They typically encompass academic monographs, book chapters and edited collections. The cOAlition S use the expression “academic books”, defined to include “monographs, book chapters, edited collections, critical editions, and other long-form works”.

**“No hybrid” policies.** Open Access funding policies adopted by institutions or other bodies whereby Open Access publishing fees or APCs are only acceptable for publications in fully Open Access journals (where these are usually mandatory) and not in hybrid ones (where payments are optional).

[See also: *Double-dipping, Hybrid journal*]

**Open Access (OA).** Mechanism or set of mechanisms for the online distribution of research publications that allows them to be freely accessed at no cost (gratis OA) and with the necessary rights for their reuse and text-mining (libre OA). In its pursuit of full, immediate Open Access Plan S requires a research work to be published under an open licence (typically a CC licence) to be deemed Open Access. As a result, whenever Open Access is used throughout this report, it's the libre OA version that it refers to.

[See also: *Creative Commons (CC) licence, Open Access (OA) flavours*]

**Open Access (OA) flavours.** Variations of OA types or models depending on the specific mechanism or route applied to a work to make it Open Access. These OA flavours – or types, or models – are traditionally identified by colours in a somewhat niche terminology further complicated by the addition of other naming criteria. The original terminology as defined at the 2022 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) only includes Green and Gold Open Access, but this categorisation was gradually expanded as the scholarly communications

landscape grew more complex. All the main OA models are included in the glossary, since some familiarity with them is critical for the understanding of this report.

[See also: *Green OA, Gold OA, Hybrid OA, Diamond OA, Bronze OA, Closed access, Subscribe to Open (S2O)*]

**Open Access policy compliance.** A research publication is compliant with a specific Open Access policy when it meets the requirements stated by such policy for its Open Access availability. For Plan S, OA policy compliance means publishing in an Open Access journal or platform or via a transformative arrangement. Rates of OA policy compliance are usually monitored by the stakeholders that have issued the policy – typically research funders, research-performing organisations or national/regional governments – to assess the degree of success in its implementation.

[See also: *Transformative arrangement*]

**Open Access (OA) repository.** Software platform to store full-text versions of accepted manuscript and to offer Open Access to them and to their associated metadata. The most frequent type of OA repositories is institutional repositories, where these platforms are maintained by Open Access teams at universities and research centres to showcase, disseminate, archive and preserve all research outputs produced at the institution. There are other types of OA repositories – aka publications or literature repositories – such as subject or discipline-based repositories, research funder repositories. OA repositories are traditionally registered in the OpenDOAR directory of OA repositories upon their launch. As of mid-June 2024, OpenDOAR lists 5,912 OA repositories worldwide.

[See also: *Green OA, Accepted Author Manuscript (AAM)*]
**Open Journal Systems (OJS).** Free open-source software platform to manage the publication of peer-reviewed scholarly journals. OJS was created and is maintained by the Canadian Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and is a widespread solution for the publication of Diamond OA journals.

[See also: Diamond OA]

**Overlay journal.** Specific type of Diamond Open Access journal whose articles are previously available as preprints or more generally in Open Access repositories. Authors may chose to submit such preprints to the journal for review and formal publication, usually by providing the link to the previously available, non-peer reviewed version.

[See also: Diamond OA]

**Plan S.** Strategy for achieving full immediate Open Access originally launched in September 2018 by a group of 12 national research funders in Europe grouped as cOAlition S. Plan S is based on 10 principles and primarily applies to research publications funded by cOAlition S funders, although its impact has steadily grown and influenced Open Access policies for other funders outside the coalition as well as national Open Access policies. The cross-funder OA policy harmonisation that Plan S has meant and the relevance of the actors involved in cOAlition S have driven publishers to engage with the Open Access community via university consortia to explore mechanisms to follow its guidance. As described in this report, Plan S encompasses a number of complementary mechanisms to achieve its goals following different Open Access routes.

[See also: cOAlition S]

**Plan S publications.** Shorthand for funded publications subject to Plan S-aligned Open Access policies issued by the research funders acknowledged in them. The expression is frequently used – always between quote signs to denote a non-formal term – in Annex 3 devoted to the monitoring of compliance with Plan S-aligned policies adopted by cOAlition S

funders. In order to be able to estimate the rates of compliance with Plan S policies, the figure of “Plan S publications” needs to be accurately determined, but this is a difficult ask when the criteria and cut-off dates cOAlition S funders have established for their Plan S-aligned OA policies are so variable.

**Predatory publishing.** Unintended side-effect of the Open Access movement whereby some dubious publishers will charge low Open Access publishing fees for manuscripts accepted in a wide range of predatory journals. These titles will typically not ensure that the minimal technical publishing standards are met and will systematically neglect the peer review process in order to get as many articles published in as little time as possible. Predatory publishers use the low fees as a bait to attract researchers who have no external funding source to publish Open Access. It is very difficult to keep an accurate and up-to-date ‘black list’ of predatory publishers and journals given how easy it is to set up an online research publishing platform, so the strategy tends to be instead to rely on ‘white lists’. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the most consolidated example of such a white list, with strict technical requirements in place that journals must meet in order to be listed.

[See also: Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)]

**Preprint.** Non-peer-reviewed full-text version of a scientific publication made openly available by its authors in a preprint server or equivalent digital library. Preprints are often – if not always – subsequently submitted to academic journals for formal publication.

**Read & Publish agreement (aka Transformative Agreement or TA).** Instrument to merge subscription or ‘read’ costs and Open Access publishing costs into one single invoice for institutions. By estimating the amount of OA publishing fees they would typically charge an institution or a whole country over a period of
time, publishers are able to offer them an
agreement that will prepay these fees on top of
the subscription costs to the research literature.
This way, publishing Gold Open Access in hybrid
titles apparently becomes cost-free for the
authors. The publish side of these agreements
typically only applies to hybrid journals, i.e. those
that still charge subscription fees, although
some publishers are gradually expanding the
coverage to their fully OA titles too – at a higher
cost. The transformative terminology stems
from the concept that by significantly growing
the rates of Open Access in hybrid journals, these
agreements will make it easier for the business
model underpinning such journals to be flipped
to a fully OA one with no reading fees anymore.
The widespread adoption of TAs by institutions
and national and regional consortia was
supported by Plan S over a period of time and, as
shown on the report, has led to significant
increases in Hybrid OA.

[See also: *Hybrid OA, Hybrid journal*]

**Research funder** (or **Research funding organisation**). Organisation devoted to the funding of research, usually by awarding research grants to successful project proposals submitted by researchers as a reply to funding calls. In the context of scholarly communications and in particular Open Access, research funders tend to be public organisations, meaning that the research they fund is publicly funded and that its results are subsequently expected to be openly available for any taxpayer to be able to read.

[See also: cOAlition S]

**Rights Retention Strategy (RRS).** Mechanism to ensure Open Access to the accepted author manuscript via the Green OA route under no embargo period and an open licence, typically a Creative Commons licence. First introduced at Harvard University in 2008, this kind of policy has seen a much more widespread adoption following its inclusion as one of the Plan S strategies by cOAlition S funders. The policy relies on the authors of research works retaining copyright over any accepted

manuscript arising from a submission of theirs
and applying a CC licence to it.

[See also: *Institutional Rights Retention Policy (IRRP)*]

**Subscribe to Open (S2O).** Recent Open Access business model that explores the possibility of economically sustaining fully OA journals by means other than mandatory Open Access publishing charges (also known as the pay-to-publish business model). The S2O model allows institutions – typically university libraries – worldwide to commit to a periodic 'subscription' payment to keep the journal fully open. When a sufficiently high number of 'subscribers to open' is reached, the journal is flipped. If the minimally sufficient number of subscribing institutions is not reached in subsequent years, the journal may revert to a closed business model.

[See also: *Gold OA*]

**Subscription journal.** Also known as closed journal, these are titles that charge a reading fee or subscription fee for accessing their content. This was the prevalent model before the Open Access movement was founded 25 years ago and it remains a widespread one today. Hybrid journals are a subcategory of subscription journals.

[See also: *Hybrid publisher*]

**Subscription model.** Traditional business model applied by closed access research publishers where a subscription or read fee is required to read the research literature published in a journal. The Open Access movement was triggered by the so-called 'serials crisis' in the early 2000s when both the prices and the number of titles for journal subscriptions grew disproportionately. In recent years, the read or subscription fees have gradually merged with the publishing fees (APCs) into so-called Read & Publish agreements.

[See also: *Subscription journal, Green OA*]
**Transformative arrangement.** Set of complementary mechanisms endorsed by cOAlition S to encourage publishers to transition to a full, immediate Open Access business model. These include transformative journals and Read & Publish (aka transformative) agreements.

[See also: Transformative journal, Read & Publish agreement]

**Transformative journal.** A scholarly journal whose publisher commits to flipping its underpinning business model from hybrid to full Open Access by dropping any subscription fees that may restrict access to its content and relying exclusively on Open Access publishing fees to economically support it. Plan S states that “a Transformative Journal (TJ) must clearly and publicly announce on the journal website its commitment to transition to full OA and agree to transition to full Open Access as soon as possible and in any event no later than when 75% of its research content is published Open Access”.

[See also: Journal flipping, Hybrid journal]

**Treatment group.** Group of observations deemed to have been affected by a given intervention (of ten a policy intervention) whose effect the analysis is trying to ascertain. In a clinical trial, the treatment group is formed of the subjects to whom a drug whose impact is being tested has been given as opposed to the control group subjects who've been given a

placebo. In the context of this study, the treatment group is formed of the publications funded by cOAlition S funders who have adopted Plan S-aligned Open Access policies.

[See also: Control group, Difference-in-differences (DiD)]

**Version of Record (VoR).** Final published version of a research publication, also known as “the publisher’s version”. Although the content of a VoR is essentially the same one found in an AAM, it is typeset and formatted according to the publisher’s standards and it very frequently carries a publisher-issued DOI (Digital Object identifier) that will identify the publication in all major research literature databases. This version (also informally known as “the PDF” even if all files are usually PDF versions) is the canonical one for citation purposes. Subsequently, both researchers and research funders have often expressed a preference to apply mechanisms to make VoRs openly available even if this may require a payment.

[See also: Accepted Author Manuscript (AAM)]
# A STUDY ON THE IMPACT OF Plan S

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