The Plan is the brainchild of Robert Jan-Smits, the Open Access Envoy of the European Commission, together with the Heads of the participating research funding organizations and the President of Science Europe . A key driver was the European Union’s announcement in 2016 that it would pursue immediate open access by 2020 5 – a target which had looked highly unlikely to be met. 6 The Plan’s supporters have emphasized the need for faster progress towards OA as the primary reason for its conception, 7 but concerns over the rising cost of the ‘transition to open access’ and the impasse in subscription negotiations within some European countries have also played a part. 8 The 11 European funders who were original signatories to the Plan have since been joined by several more from Europe and beyond. Other funders, including the European Commission itself, are expected to formally adopt the Plan S principles in time.

‘Plan S’ (which resulted from this initiative) sets out ten principles, 2 many of which have been foreshadowed in previous policy documents and developments. 3 Nevertheless, when taken together they represent a bold statement of intent from the founding group of European funders, which collectively support around 3% of the world’s research articles. 4 Of particular note are the Plan’s requirements that authors retain copyright in their works (while granting most or all copyright prerogatives to the general public, in the form of an open licence), that publication in subscription and hybrid journals be prohibited in the absence of transformative agreements, and that article publication charges (APCs) be ‘standardized’ or capped.

The announcement in September 2018 by a coalition of European research funders (‘cOAlition S’) 1 that they will require immediate open access (OA) to all their scientific publications from 1 January 2020 has triggered a wide-ranging debate over how best to accelerate the shift to OA.

A disruptive development

The principles are potentially disruptive to the current scholarly communication system as a result of both their ‘radical’ nature9 and the sheer speed with which they are due to be implemented. Within the UK context, Plan S can also be seen as the ‘end of the post-Finch consensus’,10 as the recently formed UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) elected to sign up to the Plan independently of the Universities UK Open Access Coordination Group, and prior to the completion of its ongoing review of its own OA policy.11 With UKRI accounting for as much as half of the publications within the scope of the Plan,12 and the UK home to a large number of scholarly publishers and learned societies, the response from stakeholders on these shores and beyond can tell us much about its wider prospects. The majority of these responses centre on three key assumptions that underpin the Plan, which are that:

the research literature should be treated as an intellectual commons

collective action by funders can be effective in creating such a commons

scholarly publishing services should be delivered, at least in part, by a ‘regulated market’.

The basis for each of these assumptions is considered below, followed by the Plan’s prospects for creating an equitable, efficient and sustainable scholarly communications system.

Knowledge as a commons There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that open access offers economic and societal benefits,13 yet it is notable that the Preamble to the Plan presents open access as ‘foundational’ to the scientific enterprise itself, rather than an obligation placed on science by society at large.14 By combining author retention of copyright with open licensing and no embargo periods, the Plan seeks to create what Suber has termed ‘an intellectual commons’, and Chan et al ‘a global knowledge commons’.15 A commons is simply ‘a resource shared by a group of people that is subject to social dilemmas’,16 and so is by no means incompatible with neo-liberal economic models.17 Significant work has been undertaken by FORCE11 in recent years to articulate a set of principles and practices for the scholarly commons.18 Yet determining where and how this commons meets the market remains a fraught question, since while ideas are public goods, scholarly journals are not.19 In mandating open licensing in line with the Berlin Declaration,20 cOAlition S asserts that the rights of authors, as copyright holders, to choose how their work is used are subordinate to the broader interests of the scientific community. Similarly, the role of publishers, to whom copyright in scholarly outputs is frequently assigned, is to be limited to the provision of ‘services that help scientists to review, edit, disseminate and interlink their work.’21 Open access has hitherto meant many different things to many different people,22 with some arguing that openness should be considered as a spectrum, rather than a binary state.23 In adopting the Berlin Declaration as a reference point, the coalition has sought to base its approach on a consensus definition.24 Yet the extent to which the Berlin Declaration represents the will of the research community remains hotly disputed.25 The insistence on open licensing extends the scope of the commons, and limits the role of the market. It is also one of a number of key elements that distinguishes Plan S from the ‘public access’ policies pursued to date by the United States.26

The case for collective action by funders The failure to capitalize on digital technologies to maximize the availability and usage of scientific knowledge has been described as a ‘tragic stalemate’,27 and a ‘tragedy of the anticommons’.28 As Wenzler has observed, ‘Every librarian and scholar may clearly see that an OA system is preferable to the current system and may even see how their own actions could contribute to creating it but still fail to successfully co-ordinate their efforts to achieve it.’29 Not every librarian and scholar may agree that an OA system is preferable,30 but the cOAlition S funders have been explicit on this point, stating that ‘no science should be locked behind paywalls’ and that ‘a decisive step’ needs to be taken towards the realisation of full open access.31 Plan S therefore represents an attempt to address the type of a ‘collective action dilemma’ outlined in Mancur Olsen’s Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups.32 A key finding of Olsen’s work was that ‘small groups will further their common interest better than large groups’.33 This principle accounts for the difficulties faced by libraries globally in negotiating with a small group of well-funded, highly organized commercial publishers,34 and for the difficulty of initiating methods of research publication different from the existing journal system.35 Smits himself reached a similar conclusion: ‘I thought about why the traditional system had been able to exist for such a long time: because the funders have not intervened’, he is quoted as saying. ‘The ministers made it quite clear that by 2020 we need full open access, but they left it to the universities and the libraries to negotiate with the big publishers.’36 The creation of a small but powerful group of research funders who can act in concert thus represents an attempt to break the impasse through the creation of what Ostrom has termed an ‘institution for collective action’.37 With the UK government and Research Councils UK having faced heavy criticism post-Finch for leading where the rest of the world did not follow,38 the political value of a collective approach for the funders themselves should also not be underestimated. The addition of new members, including Wellcome and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, suggests momentum is building.39 Yet Germany’s reluctance to join the coalition leaves a sizeable gap in the ranks of European funders,40 while the level of appetite for the Plan amongst US Federal funders and the Chinese authorities remains unclear. At issue is not only whether other funders, as well as libraries, will join, but also whether the coalition is seen to be acting in the collective interest of the research community, and science as a whole. Disciplinary communities display widely varying attitudes towards open access,41 with researchers in the humanities and social sciences particularly vocal in their concerns about the Plan’s implications.42 The case for funders intervening in the OA marketplace has been boosted by a recent study by Lariviére and Sugimoto, which notes: ‘the rhetoric surrounding disciplinary barriers might be more a myth than a reality: when the proper structure and incentives are in place, researchers comply’.43 Nevertheless, enforced compliance with mandates on journal articles should not obscure the need to recognize varying disciplinary cultures, and adapt requirements for other output types. The coalition appears to have acknowledged this, making a commitment to develop separate guidance on OA monographs and book chapters at a later date.44