FOAA recommendations on the Implementation of Plan S

The Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA) enthusiastically welcomed and endorsed the bold proposal of cOAlition S to accelerate the transition to Open Access in Europe during the OASPA conference September 2018 in Vienna.

FOAA has now also released extensive recommendations on the Implementation of Plan S, see https://www.fairopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Fair-Open-Access-Alliance-recommendations-Plan-S.pdf/.

The recommendations call for clarifying terminology, for support of no-fee Open Access initiatives, and for making any new infrastructure public and open. Perhaps the most important recommendation is to build cost transparency into the capped publication fee. Publishers should be required to provide the actual breakdown of costs contained in the publication fee, and make this information publicly available. A lack of transparency would establish the cap as a new price-point allowing publishers to renegotiate it every few years. It  would also entice publishers whose actual costs are below the cap to raise their costs to meet the cap. Publishers will be reluctant to provide cost information, but it is essential for Plan S to work.

The FOAA cost transparency proposal has already been agreed to by a subset of publishers in the Transparent Transition to Open Access (TTOA consortium).[1] FOAA asks for publishers to provide information about (1) indirect costs (a. journal support and submission system; b. Platform development and maintenance c. general management costs); (2) direct costs (a. editorial assistance; b. copy-editing c. promotion d. indexing and archiving (DOI, CLOCKSS etc)); and (3) profit.

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For more information, contact prof.dr. Johan Rooryck at  J.E.C.V.Rooryck@hum.leidenuniv.nl or drs. Saskia de Vries at s.c.j.devries@sampan.eu

[1] https://www.fairopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Public-statement-TTOA-consortium-30may18-def.pdf