Since its launch in September 2018, Plan S has reinvigorated the global debate on Open Access to scholarly publications. The 600 plus inputs received allowed the coalition to make changes that take into consideration the views expressed by the diverse communities affected. Changes include an extension to the formal commencement point for Plan S which will now take effect from 1 January 2021. This new timetable provides more opportunity for researchers, institutions, publishers, and repositories to make changes and for funders’ policies to develop and take effect. The Plan S principles now also reflect a commitment made by the funders to revise methods of research assessment along the lines of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).

Applications of publishers to OASPA have been rapidly increasing, in particular from publishers issuing single journals. Given the overlap in the screening criteria between DOAJ and OASPA, and that DOAJ is primarily an index of reputable open-access journals, OASPA has agreed with the DOAJ that, with immediate effect, all single journals that apply to OASPA will now be referred to the DOAJ if the journal is not already listed in DOAJ. Once approved by the DOAJ, applicants that still wish to be part of OASPA should get back in touch with the organisation.

Spain is very active in the open access movement. Although the gold route has scarcely been used there, the green route has been intensively implemented through fulfilment of European and national mandates and the development of institutional policies. Plan S is becoming a disruptive element in the context of scientific communication. The challenges and opportunities are examined to conclude that repositories can be a fundamental tool for monitoring the fulfillment of mandates.

A contract is a transformative agreement if it seeks to shift the contracted payment from a library or group of libraries to a publisher away from subscription-based reading and towards open access publishing. Transformative agreements are increasingly described as either Read-and-Publish or Publish-and-Read. Learn more in this essay which is a basic primer on transformative agreements and their characteristics and components.

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.