Preprint Article Version 3 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Few Open Access Journals are Plan S Compliant

Version 1 : Received: 15 January 2019 / Approved: 16 January 2019 / Online: 16 January 2019 (10:19:23 CET)
Version 2 : Received: 17 January 2019 / Approved: 17 January 2019 / Online: 17 January 2019 (13:13:14 CET)
Version 3 : Received: 18 January 2019 / Approved: 22 January 2019 / Online: 22 January 2019 (11:39:01 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Frantsvåg, J.E.; Strømme, T.E. Few Open Access Journals Are Compliant with Plan S. Publications 2019, 7, 26. Frantsvåg, J.E.; Strømme, T.E. Few Open Access Journals Are Compliant with Plan S. Publications 2019, 7, 26.

Abstract

Much of the debate on Plan S seems to concentrate on how to make toll access journals open access, taking for granted that existing open access journals are Plan S compliant. We suspected this was not so, and set out to explore this using DOAJ's journal metadata. We conclude that an overwhelmingly large majority of open access journals are not Plan S compliant, and that it is small HSS publishers not charging APCs that are least compliant and will face major challenges with becoming compliant. Plan S need to give special considerations to smaller publishers and/or non-APC-based journals.

Keywords

Plan S; open access journals; APC; technical requirements; publisher size

Subject

Social Sciences, Library and Information Sciences

Comments (4)

Comment 1
Received: 31 January 2019
Commenter: Egon Willighagen
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment: Small typo (I think) in the header of the bottom section of Table 6 which now repeats "(number of journals)" but where it should say "(percentage)", like in the table before it?

Great work! About the XML, I was already discussing with my publisher editor to make the XML available last autumn, and that was before the Plan S suggestion (for the jcheminf.biomedcentral.com/Journal of Cheminformatics). I pinged him again and discuss this Plan S item, see https://github.com/jcheminform/jcheminform/issues/3

You can also use that forum to ask about the number of articles published last year, for which had a field in your spreadsheet, if that would help your overview.
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Response 1 to Comment 1
Received: 5 February 2019
Commenter:
Commenter's Conflict of Interests: I am one of the authors
Comment: Thanks for your input! We won't be making any changes to the pre-print, but are eagerly awaiting the review - changes will be made during that process.

Best,
Jan Erik
Comment 2
Received: 4 February 2019
Commenter: Susan Yeyeodu
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment: I appreciate the work you put in to assembling this information. I think my question is probably shared by many academic authors attempting to publish their work using an open access platform:

Would/did you provide a list of the 1085 journals that were Plan S compliant according to the 10 criteria you analyzed?

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,
Susan Yeyeodu, PhD
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Comment 3
Received: 8 February 2019
Commenter: (Click to see Publons profile: )
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment: I have few question. Why the author only choose DOAJ? What about the other database.
Usually small journal are indexed with DOAJ so the results will be most likely in a predicted way.
Secondly, there is a suggestion to include geographic data (geodata and geoinformation) as well which will gives you more clear picture
This is an interesting article and the recommendation are reasonable.
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Response 1 to Comment 3
Received: 8 February 2019
Commenter:
Commenter's Conflict of Interests: I am one of the authors
Comment: I am not sure what you refer to with the term "the other database"?

For us, using DOAJ was the obvious choice - we knew the data (to some extent) and DOAJ registration is a Plan S requirement.

Country of publishing and language(s) of publishing are part of the metadata. There are numerous analyses that could be performed using these data, we have chosen to do only a few - but the data we have used will be made publicly available for others to perform more analysis.

We encourage comments and feedback from a broad range of readers. See criteria for comments and our Diversity statement.

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