Report: “Moving Away From APCs: a Multi-Stakeholder Working Group Convened by cOAlition S, Jisc and PLOS”

From Plan S:

cOAlition S, in partnership with Jisc and PLOS, are seeking to establish a multi-stakeholder working group to identify business models and arrangements that enable equitable participation in knowledge-sharing. The aims of this working group and the eligibility criteria that interested parties must meet in order to apply are outlined below.

We anticipate that the group will consist of a maximum of twelve individuals and will represent the three key stakeholders – funders, institutions/library consortia and publishers – in roughly equal proportions.

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What are we aiming for?

APCs have got us this far. They have usefully shown that OA is possible. But they create perverse incentives, administrative expenses, and burden for researchers, and they embed the article as the primary research artefact. Waivers are not a sustainable solution: researchers do not want to be viewed as “charitable cases” in need of funds.

At the same time, libraries unintentionally perpetuate this situation, with existing (decreasing) budgets predominantly going towards the largest publishers via “transformative agreements”, a model which locks in the APC/published unit payments and locks out those publishers trying to progress different (more equitable) OA business models.

So, if we weren’t ‘starting from here’, how would we design a model, or models, to support born-digital Open Science?

Learn More, Read the Complete Post (about 1400 words)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, PLOS