India has announced that it will
not, after all, be joining cOAlition S. Instead it will focus on developing an
open-access solution better suited to its needs. What has changed?
Last year a group of European research
funders calling themselves cOAlition S launched a radical new open-access
initiative dubbed Plan S. The aim: to
ensure that all research papers resulting from work they fund are made immediately
freely available on the internet.
Plan S has been controversial, not least
because its principles outlaw** the use of
hybrid OA (although a
transition period is permitted if time-limited “transformative arrangements”
are put in place). By banning** hybrid OA, some researchers have complained, cOAlition
S is effectively telling them where they can and cannot publish. This they
believe to be an infringement of
their academic freedom.
For their part, publishers worry that the
plan is being introduced too quickly and has not been thought through properly.
As a result, some say, it could have “serious unintended
consequences for the integrity of the scientific literature”. And while the
initial start date for Plan S has been extended from 2020 to 2021, there
continue to be concerns that the timescale is too aggressive.
More importantly, while the Plan S implementation
guidelines
permit open access to be provided by publishing in open access journals, on open
access platforms, or by depositing papers in a repository without embargo, most
believe that the practical outcome of the initiative will be a near-universal
pay-to-publish environment in which the main beneficiaries will be the publishing
oligopoly,
not the research community. Essentially, say critics, courtesy of new-style Big Deals (aka
“transformative agreements”) commercial publishers will be able to continue
profiting excessively by migrating their current exorbitant profits to the new
OA environment.
How successful has Plan S been? On launch
cOAlition S consisted of 11 funders. Today that number is still just 23. Significantly, the coalition has failed
to persuade public funders in the US or China to join (these two countries are the largest publishers of
research papers in the world). At the same time, it has lost members: the
Swedish funder Riksbankens
Jubileumsfond
pulled out in June, and the Italian funder Compagnia di San
Paolo
left cOAlition S in August. On the other hand, some believe that Plan S has so
alarmed publishers that the coalition has already achieved its objective (depending
on what one believes the objective to be).
It is, however, clearly problematic that cOAlition
S has remained an essentially European initiative. For this reason when, in
February, the Indian Government’s Principal Scientific Adviser, Professor VijayRaghavan
posted a series of tweets saying that India
was joining cOAlition S the news was greeted with great excitement by cOAlition
S members, as well as by Plan S supporters
like the European
Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas.
The news was greeted with less enthusiasm back home in India, with concerns raised about the
cost implications, the likely impact on small journals and publishers, and the way
in which it would allow commercial publishers to continue to profit excessively
from the research community – see,
for instance, here, here and here.
Following Prof. VijayRaghavan’s
tweets, however, radio silence set in, with no confirmation that India had
formally joined, or any updates on the status of its plans. For this reason many
ears pricked up last Friday when, during a lecture he gave at IISc
Bangalore
to mark Open Access Week, Prof. VijayRaghavan commented, “We are not committed
to whatever Plan S does or does not do.” This sufficiently piqued the interest
of Vasudevan Mukunth that he
sought out Prof. VijayRaghavan and asked for clarification, which led to an
interview in The Wire where it was
confirmed that India no longer plans to join cOAlition S.
As I had been trying to interview Prof.
VijayRaghavan for some months, I too was piqued by his comments and so took to Twitter to again invite him
to answer the questions I had sent him in June. He agreed and below are his answers
to an updated list of questions I emailed over to him.
