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.

In October 20-15, the League of European Research Universities (LERU) told the world that Christmas is Over. Its statement Moving Forwards on Open Access formed an important challenge to the 2016 Dutch Presidency of the EU, emphasising that things had to change in the academic publishing world. Plan S, a cooperation of Science Europe and Robert-Jan Smits (Open Access Envoy of the European Commission), is an adventurous attempt to take the debate further.

In an appeal signed by several European scientists protesting against Plan S, Lynn Kamerlin and her coauthors worry that Plan S will deprive them of quality journal venues and of international collaborative opportunities, while disadvantaging scientists whose research budgets preclude paying and playing in this OA league. They offer instead their own suggestions on how to implement Open Science.

Steven Inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer at Springer Nature, gives his views on Plan S. A range of publishing options, hybrid as well as highly selective subscription journals, are needed in order to meet the communication needs of researchers.

Toby Green, Head of Publishing at OECD Publishing (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), suggests that preprint repositories are a more intelligent approach to ensuring a fully-open playing field. If all articles were first published as preprints, and only those that succeeded in attracting the attention of journal editors were submitted for formal publishing, the average cost of publishing a paper would fall significantly. In clinging onto traditional journals to advance the careers of the few (authors), OA is delayed for the many (readers): rebuilding the reputation economy to accept preprints could be the catalyst to deliver OA, solve the serials crisis and drive out predatory journals.

 Open Access at MIT and Beyond: A White Paper of the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research examines efforts to make research and scholarship openly and freely available. It provides an overview of the open access landscape at MIT, in the U.S.A., and in Europe to help inform discussions at the Institute over the next year.

The SciELO 20-years Conference was held in September 2018 in Brazil. It constitutes an important landmark in SciELO’s evolution. The conference addressed the main political, methodological and technological issues in scholarly communication, and the trends and innovations that are shaping the future of the universal openness of scholarly publishing. A major focus was made on the SciELO network, and why it is indispensable. The presentations were added to the programme. The updated priorities and advances to open science are also refered to.

Danny Kingsley, Deputy Director at Cambridge University Library, provides an overview of OASPA conference that took place in mid-September 2018.

Open Access in the European Research Area through Scholarly Communication (OPERAS) is a consortium of 36 partners from all over Europe, that is working to build a future European infrastructure. Their initial study, OPERAS‐D, revealed a variety of models among the partners influenced by national cultures. The partners’ fragmented activities also reflect the ‘bibliodiversity’ in European societies. To address this challenge, a cooperative model is to be found to enable European actors to share expertise, resources, and costs of development.

DOAJ published its strategy and objectives for 2018-2020. Most of the work undertaken during that period will be derived from 3 key focus areas: funding and sustainability, stability and scalability, education & outreach.