The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat: we have a reproducibility leak an affordability leak a functionality leak a data leak a code leak an interoperability leak a discoverability leak a peer-review leak a long-term preservation leak a link rot leak an evaluation/assessment leak a data visualization leak … … … and even a tiny access leak still remains even after 30 years of trying to fix it.

Think, check, submit: who hasn’t heard of this mantra to help researchers navigate the jungle of commercial publishers? Who isn’t under obligation to publish in certain venues, be it because employers ask for a particular set of journals for hiring, tenure or promotion, or because of funders’ open access mandates?

Until the late 1980s or early 1990s, academic institutions such as universities and research institutes were at the forefront of developing and implementing digital technology. After email they developed Gopher, TCP/IP, http, the NCSA Mosaic browser and experimented with Mbone. Since then, at most academic institutions, infrastructure has moved past the support of email and browsers only at a glacial pace.

There are regular discussions among academics as to who should be the prime mover in infrastructure reform. Some point to the publishers to finally change their business model. Others claim that researchers need to vote with their feet and change how they publish. Again others find that libraries should just stop subscribing to journals and use the saved money for a modern publishing system.

Around the globe, there are initiatives and organizations devoted to bring “Open Access” to the world, i.e., the public availability of scholarly research works, free of charge.

Yesterday, cOAlition S published their updated principles and implementation guidelines for #PlanS, together with the rationale behind the update. This constitutes a very much welcome effort, as evidence of the increasing awareness among funders as to their potential leverage in infrastructure modernization, at a time when institutions have apparently abandoned their faculty completely.

Since cOAlition S is asking for recommendations from the community for the implementation of their Plan S, I have also chipped in. In their feedback form, they ask two questions, to which I have answered with the replies below.

Over the last ten years, scientific funding agencies across the globe have implemented policies which force their grant recipients to behave in a compliant way. For instance, the NIH OA policy mandates that research articles describing research they funded must be available via PubMedCentral within 12 months of publication. Other funders and also some institutions have implemented various policies with similar mandates.

The recent publication of the “Ten Principles of Plan S” has sparked numerous discussions among which one of several recurring themes was academic freedom. The cause for these discussions is the insistence of the funders supporting Plan S that their grant recipients only publish in certain venues under certain liberal licensing schemes.

It’s now been 24 years since Stevan Harnad sparked the open access movement by suggesting in his “subversive proposal” in 1994 that scholars ought to just publish their scholarly articles on the internet: Since then, we have been waiting on the behavior of scholars to change, such that all our works indeed become accessible.