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Efforts to eradicate paywalls have been gaining steam in Europe. Over the last few years, university consortia in several countries have been pushing for open-access agreements in negotiations that have occasionally led to heated stalemates. In Germany and Sweden, for example, around 300 institutions refused to renew their subscriptions with the scholarly publisher Elsevier, leaving thousands of academics without access to new content in the publisher’s journals since this summer.
Now, funders have joined the fight. This September, cOAlition S, a group of 11 national funding agencies across Europe, launched a plan to take an aggressive approach to end the reign of subscription-based journals.
This new initiative, dubbed Plan S, mandates that starting in 2020, academics receiving grants from participating agencies—which include funders in the UK, France, and the Netherlands—must make all scientific articles open access immediately upon publication. The coalition also outlines 10 key principles, ...
