A New Mandate Highlights Costs, Benefits of Making All Scientific Articles Free to Read

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

A new mandate highlights costs, benefits of making all scientific articles free to read:

In 2018, a group of mostly European funders sent shock waves through the world of scientific publishing by proposing an unprecedented rule: The scientists they funded would be required to make journal articles developed with their support immediately free to read when published.

The new requirement, which takes effect starting this month, seeks to upend decades of tradition in scientific publishing, whereby scientists publish their research in journals for free and publishers make money by charging universities and other institutions for subscriptions. Advocates of the new scheme, called Plan S (the S" stands for the intended shock" to the status quo), hope to destroy subscription paywalls and speed scientific progress by allowing findings to be shared more freely. It's part of a larger shift in scientific communication that began more than 20 years ago and has recently picked up steam.

Scientists have several ways to comply with Plan S, including by paying publishers a fee to make an article freely available on a journal website, or depositing the article in a free public repository where anyone can download it. The mandate is the first by an international coalition of funders, which now includes 17 agencies and six foundations, including the Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, two of the world's largest funders of biomedical research.

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