Plan S requires that, from 2020, scientific publications funded by public grants must be published in open access (OA) journals or platforms. A ‘read and publish’ agreement that offers researchers a funder compliant route to publishing in hybrid journals has been agreed by Jisc and SpringerNature.

Built on a previous arrangement, this agreement limits the costs of publishing for all UK articles in OA while maintaining access to all of Springer’s subscription articles. Jisc and Springer Nature will also continue to work together to evaluate the agreement and gather evidence to inform the transition to open access.

Plan S raises challenging questions for the Global South. Even if Plan S fails to achieve its objectives the growing determination in Europe to trigger a “global flip” to open access suggests developing countries will have to develop an alternative strategy. Richard Poynder explains what this strategy might be.

The HighWire community identifed and explored 14 implementation options for publishers and how they could deliver against the 10 principles as set out by cOAlition S. A whitepaper summarises the findings and details of the four alternative strategies to comply with the mandate, three of which require sophisticated platform features. Interested parties may download the whitepaper and watch a recording of HighWire Press’ recent webinar outlining the key outputs.

The SPA-OPS project was commissioned by Wellcome, UKRI, and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) to support learned society publishers successfully transition to open access (OA) and align with Plan S. A short background study identifies the key issues learned societies face in the light of Plan S (section 3). Then, a discussion document follows and assesses options for how learned society publishers could transition to OA and develop Plan S-compliant business models (section 4).

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) held a series of roundtable meetings with various stakeholder groups at the end of 2018 to kick off their open access policy review. Participants gathered  views on current open access policy and its effectiveness and discussed about how organisations and communities could work with UKRI to help achieve its objectives. The new OA policy should be published later this year.

There is growing concern about the increasing concentration of control of research communication functions in the hands of a small number of players, whose objectives do not reflect the interests of scholarship. In September 2017, COAR and SPARC published a joint statement related to this issue and pledged to collaborate with others on actions that will ensure research communication services are better aligned with the aims of research. Accordingly, COAR and SPARC have developed seven good practice principles for scholarly communication services. The aim is to ensure that services are transparent, open, and support the aims of scholarship.

Open Access publishing is more widespread in Latin America than in any other region of the world, and continues to grow. An interview with Dominique Babini, CLACSO’s Open Access Advisor, explains why Open Access is such a success in Latin America.

The Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S has been taken very seriously by the global scholarly communication and publishing communities. Further to the huge volume of response to cOAlitionS’ call for feedback on the Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is sharing some of the themes that she has observed emerging across the feedback documents.

On December 6^th, 2018, a group of stakeholders representing research funding organizations, academic libraries, scholarly publishers and open infrastructure providers, met in London to discuss a proposal for addressing the growing set of challenges in the implementation of institutional and funder policies supporting open access publication. The result of this meeting was broad support for this initiative, tentatively titled The OA Switchboard. Read the overview from Paul Peters and learn more about the key challenges that the OA Switchboard aims to address.

At the same time when  COAlition S was launched in Europe, AmeliCA was brewing the extension of REDALYC’s philosophy, knowledge and technology to the Global South. AmeliCA is a multi-institutional community-driven initiative supported by UNESCO, which seeks a collaborative, sustainable, protected and non-commercial solution for Open Knowledge in Latin America and the Global South. Both initiatives have a common goal: to make Open Access a reality. However, Plan S and AmeliCA imply two very different visions and two conceptualizations on the circulation of scientific knowledge. What is the main difference between them? How is it possible that some of their proposed strategies are counterposed?