[MUSIC PLAYING] CRISWELL: Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events, such as these, will affect you in the future. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMEET DOSHI: You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Ameet Doshi, in the studio with a whole group of people, Wendy, Fred. Who else is here? WILL: That's Ben. FRED RASCOE: There's Will. AMEET DOSHI: Ben, Will. Anybody else hiding around? There's a lot of people. It's a Friday. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. FRED RASCOE: Our show today is called "Plan S From Outer Space." I feel like there should be a sci-fi effect on that. AMEET DOSHI: Echo, echo, echo. [SQUEALS] FRED RASCOE: I like that. Plan S is an initiative by some European research funding agencies to make journal articles that result from said research funding openly available and accessible. WENDY HAGENMAIER: The goals are laudable. But the how gets a little murky. And the when is coming very soon, January of 2020. AMEET DOSHI: Future events such as these will affect all of us in the future, the near future. WENDY HAGENMAIER: That Ed Wood could write some thoughtful dialogue. Like the fictional Plan 9, Plan S is kind of confusing. Helping us sort it all out is Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. FRED RASCOE: If you want to join the conversation, the hashtag for this show is #LITS419 for Lost in the Stacks, episode 419. Feel free to tweet your thoughts, questions, or your favorite Ed Wood would movie with that hashtag. I like Glen or Glenda. AMEET DOSHI: That's a good-- he only did two. FRED RASCOE: Two good ones? AMEET DOSHI: Our songs today are about plans, reactions, and being overwhelmed. A lot of stakeholders in academia, publishing, and libraries can get confused trying to tie all the threads of Plan S together. So let's start the show with the way some of us might feel about Plan S. This is "So Confused" by Lilac Days right here on Lost in the Stacks. [LILAC DAYS, "SO CONFUSED"] FRED RASCOE: This is Lost in the Stacks. And joining us online is Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. She is professor and coordinator for information literacy services and instruction in the university library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the University's School of Information Sciences, and she is a frequent contributor to the Society for Scholarly Publishing Blog, a.k.a, The Scholarly Kitchen. Lisa, welcome to the show. LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: Thanks so much for having me. FRED RASCOE: And we've got you here to talk about something that is being called Plan S, which is kind of in the scholarly communication and open-access context in academic publishing. You have been part of the whole conversation that's been happening with the transformation from traditional publishing to open access for much of your career. Is that correct? LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: I think all librarians have been part of this conversation for much of our careers if we entered the profession any time in the last couple of decades. But it is indeed the case that I've had the chance to play an active role in a number of different discussions, including when I was president of the Association of College and Research Libraries in 2010, 2011. That is the year in which we moved College and Research Libraries, the flagship scholarly journal of the association, to be a gold open-access journal title. And so it was wonderful to be part of that, and it really gave me an appreciation for some of the wide range of considerations as you seek to move from a subscription business model to an open-access business model. So one of the things that we can see is there's actually been, in my mind, quite a bit of success with making the scholarship of the world open access. And in fact, a recent white paper that was made available by Digital Science, the title of which was "The Ascent of Open Access," makes the point that, for example, in the United States, almost 41% of new scholarly information, for example, published in 2016, was available in is available in an open-access format. In the United Kingdom, that's reaching over 52%. So we can see that there's actually been quite a growth from-- I'm looking at this report-- from 2000 to 2016 in the percent of the scholarship produced in the article format that is available open access. So there's been quite a bit of success in that area. However, for a number of people that question why we still have so many subscriptions-- and we also see some questioning around the alternative business models that have come up and particularly the alternative business model of the authors paying what is called an APC-- often stands for Article Processing Charge-- so that their article will be published and be made available for open reading. FRED RASCOE: It's moving the cost from the reader to the author in that situation. LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: Right. Although I think that we should, in fairness, say that what we're in most cases talking about is moving it from the reader's institution to the author's institution because most scholarly publishing reading is currently paid for by institutions, i.e., libraries. And with APCs, in many cases, those APCs are charged to an institution or to a grant funding agency or a governmental funding agency, but not always, which is also, of course, true in the subscription world. People do sometimes take out a personal subscription to a scholarly journal. But yes, in its most basic, we move from paying to read to paying to publish. So in particular then, what a number of publishers did was to take current journals and create a model in which an individual article in that journal could be made open for reading to the general public and to everyone in the world even while the rest of the articles in that same journal issue were made available on the subscription basis. And these are called or what has come to be known as the hybrid journals, where some of the content is open access and some of the content is paywalled. So the Coalition S, which I know is what we're trying to get to here, is a group of funding agencies that are in Europe primarily and particularly in Western Europe. Now I will make note that just recently a Jordanian funding agency did join the coalition. So it is no longer solely a Western European coalition. But in September 2018, when this coalition formed, it was funding agencies within primarily, as I said, Western Europe that looked at saying, how can we further accelerate open access so that we see more open access publishing, but also address this issue of the hybrid journal, where some of the articles are open access, and others are under the subscription model? And so there was also discussion of capping the APC to say that publishers could not charge more than x amount to an author who wanted to publish their article open access. That coalition released 10 principles, and those 10 principles are what are known as Plan S. FRED RASCOE: And this is a response to some of the other open-access models like, in particular, the hybrid open-access model that wasn't going far enough. And this is the opinion of the funders? Or is this the opinion of the researchers that get funding from these agencies? LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: So what we know is that the national funding organizations that I mentioned are saying that they believe those did not go far enough. And so they are adopting these 10 principles, which are to be part of their funding guidelines or mandates. So in other words, if you take a research grant from one of these agencies, then you'll be expected to publish in a way that's in concert with these 10 principles. So they don't have any force outside of those folks who are taking money, however, they seek to use the fact that they are funding scientists and researchers in order to create change in the larger publishing ecosystem by putting additional principles in place around what it means to publish open access in a Plan S-compliant way. FRED RASCOE: And we are speaking with Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe about the Plan S initiative, and we're going to be back with some of the reactions to that Plan S when we come back after a music set. WILL: File this set under BV4908.5.057. [QUESTION MARK, "FREAKING OUT"] [THE BATS, "BLOCK OF WOOD"] You just heard "Block of Wood" by The Bats. Before that, you heard "Freaking Out" by Question Mark, a couple of songs about being overwhelmed. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Today's Lost in the Stacks is all about Plan S. And we are talking to Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. In the last segment, we started talking about the principles of Plan S, the policy of it. There are no hybrid journals allowed to make an article open access, no embargoes, but there's got to be a procedure to implement those policies. And Plan S issued some implementation guidelines. Can you talk a little bit about the implementation guide that Plan S released or the coalition has released? LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: Absolutely. Yeah. There's a lot of complexity here. So we've got Coalition S, which issued 10 principles, which are the Plan S principles. And then, coming on the heels of that, they eventually released the document titled Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S. And that guidance was put out to the community with an opportunity to provide feedback about the ways these principles would be put into place, if you will. So some of it, it's very clear. You can draw a straight line from the 10 principles to part of the implementation guidance. In other areas, it's a little bit more complex with looking at some of the guidance for things like institutional repositories and the like. In addition to repositories, there's also look at things like if you do have an agreement between a library and a commercial publisher that goes for a period of time, that basically creates what they call a transition to open access with a transformative agreement. So there's a fair amount in this guidance document that sort of makes it more clear what those principles would mean as they are put into practice. Now, what we don't have yet is the final version of the guidance on implementation because they are still working through the extensive amount of feedback that the scholarly communications community provided to them. And of course, then eventually what we have to see is how do the granting agencies themselves, the funding organizations themselves, take the principles and the implementation guidelines into their own grant processes in what they require individual applicants and university applicants to sign off on as an agreement as part of getting a grant from that funding agency. So we're still in the process of moving from principles to implementation guidelines to what we will eventually see in the calls for proposals and the grant awarding process. So there is a number of concerns that people raised in the feedback that they provided. And my understanding is that there's hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pages of feedback. I know this in part because I read quite a bit of it as part of preparing a piece that I wrote for The Scholarly Kitchen on taking stock of the feedback on Plan S implementation guidance, real, straightforward and descriptive title there-- FRED RASCOE: And what did you find? LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: --in which some of these issues were raised. I mean, one thing that I think we should really take heart in is there was clear support in all of the feedback for the transition to open access and the overall goals of Plan S. So in a relatively short period of time, two decades, we've moved from people having pretty serious debates about whether or not open access was really all that good of an idea, to people by and large saying, this is a good idea. It's an important thing. And so now we're talking about how to make it happen, less whether to make it happen. That's a substantial shift. So that's the one real guiding star I think we can take away from all the feedback. And then here comes the big however. FRED RASCOE: There's always a however. LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: There's a lot of howevers here because of the fact that Plan S and the guidance is a very uniform approach. And much of the feedback says, this uniformity of approach does not recognize the complexity and diversity in the scholarly communications ecosystem. And so what might work very well in the STEM fields could really negatively impact the arts, humanities, and social sciences, particularly things related to copyright status and creative commons licenses, as well as embargoes and timelines and some of those other issues. There's a fair amount of, I guess, almost confusion, I would say, around the whole technical requires for publication platforms, institutional repositories. The guidance is, for many people, oddly specific and yet very incomplete. And so there was a lot of feedback that just sort of-- people trying to puzzle through what was actually supposed to be happening or what was desired and trying to figure that out. So I think people are really hoping for a lot of clarification there. The other area of diversity that really came out is the difference in the impact of these guidelines and principles on, say, large commercial publishers that might have a varying amounts of reserves as well as the possibilities for infusions of capital in order to make that transition in such a short period of time versus what might be possible for small, independent, and society publishers and particularly society publishers that are still small and independent. FRED RASCOE: What's the conflict there? Are society publishers a little more worried? LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: I mean, all small, independent publishers are quite concerned about this, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences. But even outside of that, the ability for them to recapitalize their systems or to find alternative revenue streams-- particularly we're quite used to the commercial publishers and thinking about where their profits go, which is into shareholders and that sort of thing. For society publishers, their surpluses are used not only to support their own publications but also, in many cases, to support the development of future scholars in the area through things like scholarships and fellowships. And so, if those revenues were to decline, their ability to support the emerging scholars in the discipline in that way will obviously be impacted. And since those are some of the things that people really value out of their societies, there's just a lot of question about how that would impact things in the context of this kind of demand that journals not be in a hybrid mode. So I mean, one of the things to recognize is that while authors would be obligated to find an open-access journal to publish in that is not hybrid, there is another path for authors, which is through what we can generally say is a green open-access model, having to do with making available the author manuscript of their journal article in an appropriate repository, at which point the version of record would not have to be the open copy. So there's a lot of details to get into about what counts as an author manuscript that would fulfill the demands of Plan S. And of course, part of what authors have to find out is what will fulfill the demands of their particular funder. And none of the funders have yet released their funding guidelines. In such cases, then the journals wouldn't have to necessarily switch from being hybrid. So there's a lot of decisions to be made by publishers about whether they even want to attempt to comply even with Plan S and make their journals a venue of possible publication. There's also the possibility that some journals could just choose to forgo the ability to publish any scholars who have funding from the coalition. That would obviously be undertaken as a decision quite seriously, but it might be that for viability some would just say this is not a possibility for us. FRED RASCOE: And we'll be back with more about Plan S on The Left Side of the Hour. [MUSIC PLAYING] TOM KRAMER: This is Tom Kramer, the chief technology strategist at the Stanford University Library, and you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. [MUSIC PLAYING] I think you already know what this song is about. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMEET DOSHI: Today's Lost in the Stacks is called "Plan S From Outer Space." And just like that Ed Wood movie, whose title we borrowed, seeing Plan S raises a lot of questions. Let's take a moment in this break to do a non-scientific sample of some examples of that feedback to Plan S and the accompanying implementation guidance. European Physical Society, their statement says that it, quote, "welcomes and supports Plan S as a medium to long-term vision but is concerned that a rushed enforcement may cause irrecoverable damage to the European academic publishing system and, in particular, to not-for-profit publishers." The European University association gives a cautious endorsement, saying it, quote, "supports Plan S and its vision to accelerate the transition to full open access even if more details on Plan S will still need to be fleshed out in the future, the very near future, like before January." The biomedical alliance of Europe is supportive of Plan S objectives while raising several concerns, for example, quote, "that not-for-profit health organizations often depend on the publication of their societies' journals as a source of income. We believe that these organizations may need more time to adapt to the new situation," end quote. So there's three examples there, and I'm seeing a theme here. Support for open access ends and some uncertainty about the means. Many more individuals and entities have made their feedback to Plan S public. And you can read more of these reactions collected at the Open Access Tracking Project online. File this set under Q180.E9K75. [COUNT FIVE, "A PSYCHOTIC REACTION"] [MARTIN HILL, "WHAT'S ALL THE FUSS ABOUT?"] WILL: You just heard "What's All the Fuss About?" by Martin Hill. Before that, you heard "A Psychotic Reaction" by the Count Five, two songs about varying degrees of reaction. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. And we're talking about Plan S with Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. We ended the last segment talking about how small publishers such as scholarly societies might forego complying with Plan S and thus possibly not publishing research funded by Coalition S members. Is that a financially realistic solution for small publishers, and how much of the research currently published originates from those Coalition S member organizations? LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: So there's a lot of different estimates of that. And I think the difficulty in answering that question about whether it's feasible for a particular publisher is to determine whether that could be answered on a title-by-title basis. A given publisher might have a whole portfolio of journals that is already Plan S-compliant. And so, for example, Springer Nature has scientific reports. It is a mega open-access journal. So that journal, which is not specific to any particular discipline in science, can really take up a lot of the articles. And so perhaps some of the other journals in its portfolio do not have to be open under Plan S rules in order for Springer Nature to still see the flow of manuscripts into it as a publishing house. That's going to be a little different kind of decision than say, a small publisher that has a portfolio of four journals, none of which are currently going to fit the parameters. But that doesn't mean the journals themselves have to flip to being a gold open-access journal. It could mean that they change their rules around author manuscripts. And so there's a lot of different pathways here towards, what options do you open up for authors within your portfolio? FRED RASCOE: With respect to that, I want to get back to repositories for just a minute in looking at the implementation guidelines as they are currently written. And I know that there's a feedback process, and there will probably be a reiteration. That option to put an author version in a repository seems really limited the way the current implementation guidelines are written. To my mind, and I think to others observing it, it seems like a typical university repository would not qualify, and maybe only something like PubMed Central would qualify as a repository that has all the check marks in this implementation guideline. LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: I think that when I said that there were a lot of questions around what it meant to be a compliant platform-- FRED RASCOE: That's a big one. LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: --I meant there are a lot of questions around what it means to be a compliant platform. [LAUGHS] So it's very difficult to see that most-- I mean, I think that is generally what people have concluded that most library-based institutional repositories, at least at the moment, do not meet what is in the draft implementation guidance. So in addition to saying that it doesn't seem that there's any library institutional repositories that would meet these guidelines, the other question becomes-- Plan S is about allocating resources to help this movement along. And while it is clear that these funding agencies have a mechanism for funding APCs so that an author could then publish by paying an APC in an appropriate journal, in the guidance itself, there's no business model for those funding agencies to impact the improvement of open-access repositories. And so I don't hear the library community being unwilling to improve their repositories. I primarily see questions of, what is it exactly that you want? And then secondly, if this is what you want, and you as funders are saying, it is important for us to fund the things that are important to us, what kind of mechanisms can the coalition put into place in order to fund the repository development so that we can have the repositories that they wish to see? There's a clear mechanism in the guidelines and the principles for the funding agencies to fund version of record open-access copies. That is the APC fee. There's no financial mechanism in the guidance at the moment for how repositories could be the kind of spaces that they are calling for. FRED RASCOE: So, Lisa, what happens next? What is in the future for Plan S principles and the implementation of those principles? LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: So next we wait to see the final version of the guidance on the implementation, which we understand is coming sometime this spring. From the finalization of that guidance, I'm sure everyone will be watching for the calls for applicants that each granting agency puts out and each funding organization puts out to its population. And that's when we'll see how these principles and guidelines get put into practice because practice is where we are really going to understand the real impact of how this might change what is expected of scholars and of publishers and eventually of how this might have an impact on transforming the system because even if it isn't the only thing that is working to move open access forward, it clearly will have an impact in making scholarship open. And if nothing else, it has absolutely raised the awareness and level of discussion around the questions of business models for open access and forced us to grapple with questions of how we can understand what's possible in our current system and what capabilities we need to develop in our system if we really want to move towards this full, open-access future. FRED RASCOE: It's always fun to see the theoretical come into practice, see what happens. LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: Exactly. FRED RASCOE: Well, we have been speaking today about the Plan S initiative with Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. She is professor and coordinator for information literacy services and instruction in the university library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also an affiliate faculty member there in the School of Information Sciences and is a contributor to the blog The Scholarly Kitchen. Lisa, thank you so much for joining us. [MUSIC PLAYING] Lisa, I went into this thinking that it was complicated. And my goodness, I did not know how complicated it actually was. LISA JANICKE HINCHLIFFE: [LAUGHS] I mean, and I'm not even-- I mean, I feel like I speak confidently and that I still at the same time am like-- [YELLS] [MUSIC PLAYING] WILL: File this set under Z286.063. [THE APPENDIXES, "THE PLAN"] [THE GORIES, "THE VIEW FROM HERE"] You just heard "The View From Here" by The Gories. Before that was "The Plan" by The Appendixes. You heard that right. That is not grammatically incorrect for that band's name. These were songs about getting perspective on important plans. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMEET DOSHI: Our show today was called "Plan S from Outer Space." [SOFT HISS] While Plan S isn't really from outer space, the implementation guidelines certainly put some folks back on their heels just a bit. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Our helpful guest, Lisa Janicke Hinchcliffe, guided us through the implications and possible outcomes. FRED RASCOE: And Lisa also reassured us that if Plan S is making us confused, that just means we're paying attention. Roll those credits. [MUSIC PLAYING] WILL: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, produced by Charlie Bennett, Ameet Doshi, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Fred Rascoe. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Will, woo-hoo, was our engineer today. And the show was brought to you in part by open-access advocates everywhere. FRED RASCOE: Legal counsel and Plans A through R were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Special thanks to Lisa for being on the show. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. AMEET DOSHI: Find us online at lostinthestacks.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and plenty of other places we don't even know about. FRED RASCOE: Next week on Lost in the Stacks, it's deja vu all over again because it's a rerun. AMEET DOSHI: It's time for our last song and one more note of appreciation to our guest today. Lisa helped provide us with clarifying information on the radio. She does the same for her classes, speaking at conferences, writing on blogs, and on social media. In fact, on Twitter, her handle is @lisalibrarian. So let's close with-- wow, Fred, well done-- "Lisa Librarian" by Velocity Girl, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody. [VELOCITY GIRL, "LISA LIBRARIAN"] I need the light.