Plan S: JISC’s Neil Jacobs Appointed Interim Programme Manager for cOAlition S

Full Text of a cOAlition S Statement:

Neil Jacobs, Head of Open Science and research lifecycle at UK not-for-profit, Jisc, has been appointed as interim programme manager for cOAlition S.

Neil will take forward the work of the consortium, Plan S, to help accelerate the transition to full and immediate Open Access. Plan S requires that scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms.

Commenting on his new role, Neil Jacobs says: “Jisc has enthusiastically agreed to a request from cOAlition S that it provide programme support for the remainder of 2019 in the first instance.

Neil has been actively supporting open access for more than 15 years, the majority of that time at Jisc, which supports UK universities and research centres in the use of digital technologies. He has championed the UK programmes that led to the widespread take-up of repositories in the UK, and fostered the development of services such as SHERPA RoMEO, which gives a summary of publishers’ open access archiving conditions for individual journals as well as OpenDOAR, the world’s authoritative and quality-assured directory of open access repositories.

Neil also actively advises Jisc in its negotiations with publishers on transformative deals such as the recent agreement with Springer Nature. Neil represents the UK rectors group on the European University Association Open Science Expert Group and is a member of the board of the Directory of OA Books.

Neil Jacobs will work three days a week in the cOAlition S role starting in early June and working through to the end of the calendar year.

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