Open access at a crossroads

As European science funders promote a radical new open-access (OA) publishing mandate (known as Plan S), the Trump administration is considering changes to a five-year-old directive governing the public release of research literature sponsored by federal agencies. In early October, a delegation led by Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission’s special envoy on OA, met with officials of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and other federal agencies, as part of an effort to gain broad support for the new European policy.