Part Two

Abstract

ContentsAcknowledgements vii Foreword ixPart One 1.1 Welcome to the world of academic publishing 1.2 What exactly is open access anyway? A note on licensing 1.3 Why OA? Reason 1: It's the principle Reason 2: It makes economic sense Reason 3: It makes research more accessible -which benefits society Reason 4: Open access makes the research process faster and more efficient Reason 5: Open access improves the quality and trustability of research Reason 6: It's in the public interest Reason 7: It makes research more inclusive Reason 8: It allows for inclusiveness and connectivity Reason 9: It helps the Global South Reason 10: Academic research was always intended to be open 1.4 Academic publishing: a brief history History repeating Publishing becomes big business 1.5 The internet and OA: the early pioneers The European campaign A new era for academic publishing 1.6 The Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation pave the way for OA 1.7 The Finch Report: taking OA to a political level 1.8 Brussels gets involved; the momentum picks up 1.9 Slow progress: the move towards OA stagnates Reason 1: Big business, big financial interests and demanding shareholders Hybrids: a halfway house Reason 2: Obsession with 'impact factor' Reason 3: Lip service to DORA Reason 4: Resistance to change; reluctance to take action 1.10 Time for a radical intervention Part Two2.1 The open access envoy 2.2 Forming a plan 2.3 The impact on smaller publishers 2.4 Warning bells 2.5 Gaining allies 2.6 The European tour 2.7 Support arrives from the universities 2.8 Gaining support from the younger generation of researchers 2.9 Compromises, compromises 2.10 The Coalition is born for others it was the painful task of digging through documents from several years ago to provide sources, figures or background information. Thank you for your valuable insights and patience.All the publishers mentioned in the text were contacted with a request for an interview and given the right to respond to content. A special thanks to those who chose to respond.We would especially like to thank Frederick Fenter, Lia Noce, Agata Zaza and the rest of the team at Frontiers, without whom this book would not have been possible. Frontiers paid for Rachael's time spent writing the book, but had no influence over its content or editorial direction.Finally, this book was written with the intention of prompting debate as part of the continuing conversations happening around open access, and we welcome readers' comments and observations.

Players or Pawns? University Response to the Introduction of Plan S

“…National governments and intermediate government bodies have been directly engaged in the international and especially the European research policy agenda, although policy downloadingadaptation of European policiesfrom the EU is routine in the Norwegian higher education system (Karlsen 2015). Key national actors have also been present and at times acted as key policy entrepreneurs in developing the OA agenda, not least the Research Council of Norway (RCN) (Smits and Pells 2022). A major factor in the Norwegian case of OA is the role that the then director of the RCN played in the European arena (Smits and Pells 2022).…”

“…Key national actors have also been present and at times acted as key policy entrepreneurs in developing the OA agenda, not least the Research Council of Norway (RCN) (Smits and Pells 2022). A major factor in the Norwegian case of OA is the role that the then director of the RCN played in the European arena (Smits and Pells 2022). As the RCN is the only research council in Norway and in most areas has the monopoly on the distribution of research funding in the national competitive arena, its initiatives are important in Norwegian higher education.…”

“…The outputs of this activityespecially via the academic publishing industryhave been the key mechanism for science not only to foster internal communication across the various academic fields, but also to communicate with society and provide updated knowledge (Merton 1973). However, the fact that most of the science communication industry is controlled by a limited number of private publishing companies that normally demand a fee or a subscription for accessing the scientific results has been an issue drawing increasing attention as one of the main obstacles for improving the links between science and society (Smits and Pells 2022). It is increasingly recognized by both public and private research funding bodies as well as the broader public that science results should be openly accessible to all.…”

“…In 2018, Plan S was launched as a possible solution, realizing the ambition of open access and open science, stating that from 2021 all scholarly publications on research results funded by public or private grants provided by research councils and other funding bodies must be published in an open access journal, or made available in other waysfor example through open access archives or repositories (European Commission 2019). Science Europe, an association of major research-funding bodies in Europe, and the more recently established cOAlition San international consortium of research funding bodies including the European Commissionwas a key supporter and a key driver of Plan S (Smits and Pells 2022).…”

Research assessment under debate: disentangling the interest around the DORA declaration on Twitter

“…The maximum activity during the study period is 2018, with 5,333 tweets published (1,568 by DORA, 3,508 in the user-mention dataset, and 257 in the hashtag-mention dataset). This rise in tweets could be associated with two events launched that year: the announcement of Plan S 2 (Smits & Pells, 2022) and the creation of the European Open Science Cloud 3 . Similarly, the strong linkage between Open Science and DORA (Abadal, 2021) could explain this rise (e.g., hashtags assigned to the Open category rose from 1 in 2015 to 221 in 2019).…”