The Open Access movement got some good news when China announced they would back Plan S. Plan S is the European-led program to make all publicly funded research freely available upon publication in a journal.
One would hardly think this would be controversial. After all, the public pays to have the research done and then has to pay again if they want to see the results. The journal publishers love it, of course: they don’t pay for the research, they don’t pay for the writing, they don’t pay for the reviewing, and, often, they don’t even pay for the editing yet they get to sell it back to the producers at outrageously high subscription fees. The University of California, for example, spends about $8.7M per year on subscriptions from Elsevier alone.
The U.S. and Europe have been pressing the publishers on open access issues for some time but China’s announcement caught everyone by surprise, especially the publishers. China is a huge market and produces a significant amount of research so their support of the open access movement is a big deal.
Irreal would be failing in its curmudgeonly duty if we didn’t point out that the problem the open access movement is trying to remedy is largely the result of the victims’ own actions. The publishers’ only leverage—if you want to publish your paper in our journal, you can’t make it available for free or you can’t make it available until a year after publication—disappears if academics simply refuse to publish in those journals. The problem is that publishing in top flight journals, which largely adhere to those restrictions, are important in tenure and promotion decisions so faculty continue to submit their papers to those journals. I don’t expect a lot progress until academia resolves its own issues.