The gap between Plan S requirements and grantees’ publication practices

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate potential differences—called the gap—in publication practices between the requirements of three routes established by the cOAlition S to be compliant with Plan S requirements and actual publication patterns, regarding publishing research funded by a national funder. We use Scopus data on 27,302 publications from 2014 to 2019 funded by the National Science Centre Poland (a member of cOAlition S). Our analysis reveals that almost one-third of publications would not meet the requirements of Plan S even though some of them are open access. Moreover, monitoring open access at the level of publications cannot be used to monitor or verify fulfilment of the requirements of Plan S, and gathering data to verify whether a journal is compliant with Plan S is a challenging task because of the lack of trusted data sources. We argue that the implementation of Plan S would require either a change of publication practices by researchers, or a substantial transformation of the academic publishing market to meet the expectation designed by cOAlition S and implemented by national and regional funders.

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