--- title: "Notes on 'Plan S for Shock'" layout: post image: feature: oa.png --- These are my notes on Smits, Robert-Jan, and Rachael Pells, _Plan S for Shock_ (London: Ubiquity Press, 2022) , originally taken on Twitter. They just constitute thoughts I had while reading the book, as opposed to any form of structural review. I must say that the ToC has raised my hackles a little already. "Know when it is done; plan an exit". We're far from done. I've been working on this for well over a decade. We're nowhere near "done" and throwing in a grenade then walking away feels quite a privilege. But perhaps it's less incendiary than this makes out. Let's see. P 1 a "new model, open access, where the author pays". Uh oh. This is not a great start. 🤦 That inaccurate characterisation is from Randy Schekman's foreword. Frustrating for those who are working for equitable models that work in all disciplines to have this erroneous definition repeated. The characterisation of subscription-based publishing as a way to distribute the costs between thousands of libraries is a key point on p 3. The opposite is the strong weakness of APCs. Big emphasis in the opening chapter on medical context and patient self-education. Academic promotion and tenure systems also making an early appearance around p 6. "Step away from the keyboard... Clearly this is... Oversimplified" 😏 Green, gold, and diamond enter on p 8. "The gold route usually asks the author to pay a fee". Well, I guess this terminological battle is lost. That said, the definition of diamond is nuanced here - and it notes that it possibly should not even be its own category Diamond "is the most commonly used model" at the journal level but not by number of articles. P 9 "Pure OA research is published using a CC BY license" - p 9. Probably an important statement to come back to. P 10 dives into the taxpayer argument. (Also, CoI alert, I'm cited here.) On the nuance of this, I always recommend @petersuber's [The Taxpayer Argument](https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4725013) I still feel as I am cited here that "we should, instead, focus on the public good argument of all research, rather than saying 'it was funded by governments so it should be open'". P 11 takes us onto the economic arguments for OA. In particular, the mega profits of big publishers. P 12 notes that a 37% profit margin indicates substantial market dysfunction. P 14 is the first Sci Hub mention 😏 Pp 14-15 are about research efficiency and OA. I must say, having spent 30 minutes just trying to get access to a book the other day - which it turned out that our library DID have access to - I empathise with this. That was a total waste of my time. P 15 is first mention of reproducibility and also that originality, in itself, should perhaps not be seen as the be all and end all of academic inquiry P 16 argues that if your work is more visible, you'll take more care over it Pp 18-19 reiterate the patient access argument. I very strongly identify with this from [when I had a stroke](/2016/04/07/open-access-in-a-time-of-illness/) Pp 21-22 give the "collaborative/citizen science" arguments for openness P 24 gives inclusivity arguments, including a quote from me on the fact that there are some people who will never be able access a public library to read an academic paper or book for disability reasons Pp 24-26 note the benefits of open access to poorer regions of the world. This feels a bit unidirectional to me. There's a broader culture in the global North of not reading work from people outside our own known spaces. A bigger problem than OA. P 26 also makes the (I'd say contentious) argument that academic research was always intended to be open. Cites Aileen Fyfe's work, some of which [appeared in OLH](https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4494/) The piece actually cited is Aileen's [chapter in our edited collection](https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4933/chapter/625163/The-Royal-Society-and-the-Noncommercial) I suppose the query I have around all this is whether it's fair to ascribe a drive towards digital infinite reproduction to an era that had no such technology Around p 33 is a good overview of early OA practices P 37 notes that the Ebola outbreak was predicted but says the problem was that the paywalled publication system meant it wasn't heeded. Then moves on to Covid. Reminds me of [this comic](https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/new-phone-2/) though. The covid literature IS OA. But we still face massive (social) problems confronting it Pp 37-38 do a good job documenting the pioneering work at Wellcome P 39 covers the Gates foundation. I do still find it very odd that Gates should have such a strong focus on open access, given the historical extreme antagonism to open source software. Pp 40-42 gives an OA timetable overview. I was about to remark on the lack of Finch report mention, but that's just come up now. Pp 43-44 is on the EC and Horizon programme mandates Why has OA not become the default? P 47 starts some answers. First turning to commercial opposition from big publisher business. Some good stuff on motivations on p 48 - noting that different people want different things P 52 now turns to the emergence of hybrid OA Predictably strong anti-hybrid strategy - a failed "transition" measure, clearly Pp 53-54 now turns to Impact Factor and its role in driving publication practices. Interesting that Sheckman says that IF was supposed to be an economic measure for libraries to decide what to subscribe to. P 55 covers humanities fields and the slightly different, non-IF approaches P 56 has some very good comments from Stephen Curry on Chinese practices of paying researchers for publications in top journals. He rightly points out that this is just the more explicit version of what we do in the West anyway, via proxies of hiring and promotion. Pp 57-59 covers DORA and specifically the difference between signing it and implementing it. Pp 59-61 detail the establishment of Glossa. Bit of a shame it doesn't mention that it's funded/published by OLH and that you need a new economic model in place to cover publisher labour 🤔 Part 2 is going to be the much more personal insider story of Robert J-S by the looks of things. "The exact assignment" on p 67. Moves from analysis to concrete policy demands. Pages 70-72 do a fair job of describing the anxiety from smaller publishers around Plan S and a transition to APC-driven gold in disciplines where project funding is not the norm. P 76 notes the collective action problem and the challenges of funder coordination P 80 gives a very interesting perspective from David Sweeney - OA is not just an issue for funders. Universities have to change what they fund if they want a new system. Pp 82-83 sums up the ECR issues around Plan S pretty well. Prestige traps etc The free market spats around APC price caps on p 85 is important stuff. This is at the core of the Plan S dilemma - "who are we to set the price cap?" they ask... But the market is dysfunctional and full of negative externalities that displace price sensitivity Ah, there's the "academic freedom" argument - initial dissent from Germany. P 88 Pp 90-94 covers the complexities and nuances of predatory publishing - pretty well, in fact And there you have it on p 97. The "S" of "Plan S" stands for "science, speed, solution and shock". Explicit framing, I'd say, in that last term of "disruptive innovation". Except, as the previous segment on smaller publishers noted, it's them, not the big players, who go under. Big publishers - supposedly the ones at whom the anger generating the plan was directed - can withstand the shock. Smaller "good actors" become collateral and you can end up with just the menaces remaining. Hmm. That the public doesn't know that universities do research seems to me way more of a problem than anything else in this paragraph Which is on p 98 🙄 a screenshot from the book that says that the public do not understand university research P 102 details the start of US involvement - one of the trickiest policy landscapes given its decentralisation P 106 is perhaps the first point at which publisher labour is mentioned, implicitly. We focus a lot on the monetary inputs, but a better way of reconceiving the whole system would be to ask: what labour functions do we want and need from academic publishing? I don't think there is clear agreement between anybody on this. And that makes it very hard to say what we should pay for it. Anyway, R-J S is quoted as saying "we knew what SCIENCE [the journal] did was extremely valuable". But doesn't say exactly what that is. P 107 details the objections from chemists. I often point to this discipline when people say there's a straightforward "the Humanities hate OA while the sciences don't" rhetoric. It's way more complex than that. Ok, there's an argument on pp 110-111 from Kamerlin that the data storage and electricity costs of running a big journal are the major costs. This is just such a huge blunder. The costs are _people_ and labour, not running four backup servers. Try "creating accurate standards-compliant metadata" or "ensuring ingest into 25 indexing services". Even "invoicing universities for APCs" is actually quite expensive. There's more on the academic freedom debate on pp 113-114. I think where I stand on this is that most academic freedom statutes were surely designed to ensure that academics could not be censored. Hence, if OA mandates are trying to secure broadest dissemination they're not against the spirit of academic freedom, even if they may seem, in some national frameworks, to violate the letter of the law. It's much more complex of course and I've blogged a lot about this P 121 details transformative agreements. These are really tricky from our perspective because [we can't afford them](/2020/05/09/transformative-agreements-in-the-time-of-covid-19/) Pp 122-123 gives further examples of rebel editorial board breakaways from the big for-profits. Again, I'd like to have seen more on what makes such breakaways possible and/or succeed. Every article at Glossa costs OLH and we can only fund it via our library membership scheme P 124 begins the critiques of Plan S from Latin America The major worry being the introduction of APCs into a system that didn't have them! Interesting to hear Johan Rooryck's view on p 138 that "you don't want shocks through the system"... Given that this was apparently one of the things for which "S" stands P 139 kicks off the discussion of the rights retention strategy. There's a whole secret history to be written on this around the Scholarly Communications License and the work of Chris Banks at Imperial Pp 141-143 are lots of arguments against RRS from publishers. One of the key ones here that I'm not sure I agree with is the "what's the point in rights retention if you then openly license the work?" This is precisely how copy left works though in software. You use your copyright in order to be able to give your rights away. Part of a strange but nonetheless virtuous circle of ownership and relinquishment. P 153 has thoughts from Robert Kiley on whether the future will have "journals" in the way we do today. There's been some discussion of this on twitter, I believe, w/ @samoore_ over the past few days and to what extent they represent useful ideas of "community" or "discipline". Haha: a screenshot from the book that says that Elsevier didn't reply to requests for comment More on the Robert Kiley vision of a post-journal world on p 155-158. I really like lots about this but wilt at the activation energy required to shift our system to it! Some potential good signs in my discipline from repos like Humanities Commons. That said, the Burgelman follow up on p 158 in which there's no such thing as an article just makes virtually no sense at all in my discipline. Gets far too Gradgrind for my liking. I do not share Bodo Stern's optimism that an APC market will develop with price sensitivity because, as has been pointed out many times before, researchers don't feel that price point. They get reputational prestige advantage while someone else pays. P 163 P 166 draws attention to the problem I highlighted earlier: that the "shock" of Plan S, inspired by anger at the profiteering of big publishers, could lead to the bankruptcy of many small publishers without cushions... But likely not the biggest 5. I've been quite forthright in a few of the cited instances in this book - was clearly feeling in a less diplomatic mood that day! 😬 P 195 - OK. It does stand for "Smits" 😏 Overall, this was an interesting book. It's well written (v few typos "Elsevier Elsevier", "CC CY") in an engaging journalistic style. I wonder who the core readers will be? It's not academic and there is a core focus on the public access to science angle. But it's dealing with so many intricacies of the academy and academic publishing that I'd be very surprised if nonspecialists could grapple with it all, straight out.