A group of 16 science funders have detailed their ambitious plan to ensure that, by 2020, the results of the research they support is immediately free to read. Since the September launch of the initiative, known as Plan S, scientists have speculated as to how it could affect their research. Many publishers have also expressed serious concerns about the proposal and have questioned its rationale for excluding ‘hybrid journals’ — journals that allow researchers to make their work free to read if they pay a fee, but that keep other studies behind a paywall. Now, documents released on 26 November clarify that researchers will be allowed to publish in hybrid journals if they can post the accepted manuscript or final article in an approved open-access repository at the time of publication — but in these cases, the funder will not pay for publishing. The plan’s documents also list three ways in which researchers can publish work that is compliant with the plan: publish in an open-access journal or platform approved by the funders; immediately put a copy of the manuscript accepted by the journal, or the final published article, in an approved open-access repository; or use a hybrid journal that intends to become a full open-access venue. Under all three routes, the papers must be published with a liberal CC BY licence, which allows commercial reuse of the papers’ findings. The posting of an article to a preprint server is not, alone, sufficient to comply with these rules.

This article in Nature gives more details:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07557-w

Organisations in the coalition behind Plan S include:

European Commission, including the European Research Council;

• Austria: Austrian Science Fund;
• Finland: Academy of Finland;
• France: Agence Nationale de la Recherche;
• Ireland: Science Foundation Ireland;
• Italy: Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare;
• Luxembourg: Luxembourger National Research Fund;
• Netherlands: Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research;
• Norway: Research Council of Norway;
• Poland: National Science Centre;
• Slovenia: Slovenian Research Agency ;
• Sweden: Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas);Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte); Swedish Riksbank's Jubileee Fond (RJ)
• United Kingdom: United Kingdom Research and Innovation; Wellcome Trust
• United States: Gates Foundation.

Knowledge should be shared without any barriers in nature. OA is the future - thus, IEEE publications may be eventually abandoned or replaced if not offer OA. Of course, following this, we have to increase the budget to make publications at IEEE open-access. So, for IEEE or even other publishers, they are still making money by charging OA fees. It is the researchers who should think about the viability of implementing this when attracting funding, in my opinion.

But, is that really worth to do so? Is that really important to publish scientific results in journals? Or should we just make the results freely accessible? I think, in this case, it may violate the principle of IP protection and also may affect the motivation to advance science.

What does Plan S say about research who want to publish in OA journals but do not have public funding? Will we still be charged high fees or forced behind pay walls?

This plan only refers to scientific research sponsored by public funding. Open Access does not mean fees will disappear, the hybrid open access is not an option and the subscription based access is what is being questioned here.

A group of 16 science funders have detailed their ambitious plan to ensure that, by 2020, the results of the research they support is immediately free to read. Since the September launch of the initiative, known as Plan S, scientists have speculated as to how it could affect their research. Many publishers have also expressed serious concerns about the proposal and have questioned its rationale for excluding ‘hybrid journals’ — journals that allow researchers to make their work free to read if they pay a fee, but that keep other studies behind a paywall. Now, documents released on 26 November clarify that researchers will be allowed to publish in hybrid journals if they can post the accepted manuscript or final article in an approved open-access repository at the time of publication — but in these cases, the funder will not pay for publishing. The plan’s documents also list three ways in which researchers can publish work that is compliant with the plan: publish in an open-access journal or platform approved by the funders; immediately put a copy of the manuscript accepted by the journal, or the final published article, in an approved open-access repository; or use a hybrid journal that intends to become a full open-access venue. Under all three routes, the papers must be published with a liberal CC BY licence, which allows commercial reuse of the papers’ findings. The posting of an article to a preprint server is not, alone, sufficient to comply with these rules.

This article in Nature gives more details:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07557-w

Organisations in the coalition behind Plan S include:

European Commission, including the European Research Council;

• Austria: Austrian Science Fund;
• Finland: Academy of Finland;
• France: Agence Nationale de la Recherche;
• Ireland: Science Foundation Ireland;
• Italy: Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare;
• Luxembourg: Luxembourger National Research Fund;
• Netherlands: Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research;
• Norway: Research Council of Norway;
• Poland: National Science Centre;
• Slovenia: Slovenian Research Agency ;
• Sweden: Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas);Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte); Swedish Riksbank's Jubileee Fond (RJ)
• United Kingdom: United Kingdom Research and Innovation; Wellcome Trust
• United States: Gates Foundation.

This failed system should have been changed way before. It is so unfair that although all the revisions are based on a voluntary basis, not to mention the efforts the authors put in to get their articles published, the publishers are making a huge profit out of it. I don't say that should not charge for publishing articles, but why so expensive?

The authors are the essential ingredients for the proceedings and transactions to continue their existence. Yet, if an author joins an institute that does not have a paid membership to that database, he/she needs to pay to be able to read their own paper. This is extremely wrong. On top of all of these, why do we do research? To serve for the society to improve or to serve for the rich tycoons who make a crazy amount of money thanks to the swarming number of articles submitted to their journals/conferences.

The science MUST be free.

OA will replace existing model of publishing. It's only a question of time. More and more journals nowadays try to make publications openly accessible. Open repositories for post- and preprints increase their popularity. Fully commercial journals slow down science and should definitely be replaced by OA in the future.