Abstract

The proposal made in September 2018 by cOAlition S to progress towards full immediate open access (OA) by signing transformative agreements with publishers was received with understandable skepticism by some relevant actors in countries with lower OA implementation and lower economic resources to address this transition. This text argues that these so-called transformative agreements are bound to be most efficient where green OA is already consolidated and explores the viability of the new Rights Retention Strategy as a corollary of such a strategy.

Abstract

Plan S promotes that all articles from research funded by public financing agencies that subscribe it, have to be publicly available immediately, either in open access journals or in repositories that meet certain conditions, as of January 2021. Plan S has been promoted by Science Europe, a group of public research funding agencies through the cOAlition S, and has published two versions that have generated intense academic debate worldwide. Even though no public or private research agency of Spain has been committed at the moment to support Plan S, it is interesting to assess how this Plan can affect the ecosystem of Spanish scientific journals. We present the results of the analysis of the Spanish journals of SCImago Journal Rank in Social Sciences and the compliance that they have with the requirements that cOAlition S has described for the journals to be considered of Open Access of quality. These requirements are related to the opening of the content, the payment model, technical aspects and copyright. It is concluded that although most journals meet the requirements related to open content, they are left with challenges related to the technical aspects of maximum interoperability and reuse. Journals are recommended to take the Plan S as an opportunity and take advantage to carry out a full digital transformation.

Abstract

With the support of governments, research funding agencies or academic institutions, Open Access is taking hold in the field of scholarly communication. More and more cases are found where recommendations on Open Access publication are transformed into obligations that researchers must comply with. Plan S, the Spanish Law on Science, Technology and Innovation or several university mandates are some examples of this change in trend. Given this situation, it is necessary to check compliance with these mandates from at least two points of view, on the one hand, to ensure that publications are in Open Access and on the other hand, that they comply with the established deadlines. So far, several attempts have been made to monitor compliance with the mandates from different perspectives, however, few have considered the time frame in which a publication must be in Open Access. To improve this monitoring, we propose the use of existing information in the repositories, such as, information on the funders, date of publication of the work in the academic journal and date of deposit in the repository, as well as the presentation of this information through the OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative – Procotol for Metadata Harvesting). In this way, monitoring could be improved at the institutional level. In addition, this information could also be collected by harvesters such as Recolecta, so that they can become a tool for monitoring Open Access publication mandates at the national level.