This article looks at whether there is evidence to support two prevailing assumptions about open access (OA). These assumptions are: (1) fully OA journals are inherently of poorer quality than journals supported by other business models and (2) the OA business model is more ‘competitive’ than the subscription journal access business model. By combining citation‐based impact scores with data from publishers’ price lists, the authors were able to look for relationships between business model, price, and ‘quality’ across several thousands of journals. They found no evidence suggesting that OA journals suffer significant quality issues compared with non‐OA journals. Furthermore, authors do not appear to ‘shop around’ based on OA price.

Mikael Laakso, as a member of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 expert group on the Future of Scholarly Publishing and scholarly Communication, explains the necessity of building up a public infrastructure for open access, its benefits and the obstacles on the way.

cOAlition S is a group of national research funding organizations and charitable foundations who have agreed to implement the 10 principles of Plan S in a coordinated way. cOAlition S has solicited public feedback on its guidance for implementation. Harvard Library and the MIT Libraries have jointly issued their recommendations in response.

Many of the discussions surrounding Open Access (OA) revolve around how it affects publishing practices across different academic disciplines. Recent large-scale bibliometric studies show that the uptake of OA differs substantially across disciplines. This study investigates the underlying mechanisms that cause disciplines to vary in their OA publishing practices. How do different disciplines adopt and shape OA publishing practices? What discipline-specific barriers to and potentials for OA can be identified?

Leslie Chan is Associate Director at the University of Toronto Scarborough. As one of the original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, he has been active in the experimentation and implementation of scholarly communication initiatives of varying scales around the world. He expresses his views about the internationalisation of research produced in the Global South, the current state of Open Access, and the Knowledge G.A.P project, an attempt to understand the various social justice issues related to the production and circulation of academic knowledge.

An updated analysis of Open Data and Open Science policies across Europe reports a continued increase in the growth of related policies and an increase in uptake in countries where no such policy previously existed. This report specifically examines activity across Europe between January and November 2018. The analysis delves into the types of policies in place across Europe, examining their processes of creation and some key specifics.

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) reiterates its support for the goal of Plan S to achieve immediate Open Access to all scholarly publications from research. COAR and others in the repository community have significant concerns related to several of the requirements for repositories. Some of these might create artificial barriers to the participation of universities and other research organizations in the scholarly communication system.

Scholastica, a vanguard academic journal software and service provider with tools for peer review and open access publishing, has announced new archiving and indexing automations. Scholastica now offers automated article and metadata deposits for the Portico digital preservation archive and for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The new automations are in line with Scholastica’s mission to modernise all areas of publishing, helping OA journal publishers do more with fewer resources.

In three position papers, China’s National Science Library (NSL), its National Science and Technology Library (NSTL) and the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), all said that they support the efforts of Plan S to transform research papers from publicly funded projects into immediate open access after publication. However, it is not yet clear when Chinese organizations will begin implementing new policies, or whether they will adopt all of Plan S’s details.

cOAlition S has recently released guidance on the implementation of Plan S. While it provides many new details about the plan, it has not provided reassurance to anxious society publishers. As a matter of fact, the cOAlition S vision of the future of scientific and scholarly publishing is in contradiction with the values and practices of most society publishers. While in theory Plan S supports “diversity of models and non APC-based outlets,” in reality such models are not presently available to society publishers. The author proposes a solution and encourages Society leadership and society members to provide feedback on Plan S and its impact on their society journal programs here: https://www.coalition-s.org/feedback/.