Simon Rallison, Director of Scientific Programmes, The Physiological Society, UK

Professor Deborah Baines, Chair of Publications Committee, The Physiological Society & St. George’s University of London, UK

Alex Stewart, Deputy Managing Editor, Experimental Physiology, UK

https://doi.org/10.36866/122.11

The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS). If you’re a researcher you’ll probably be hearing more about it, but what is it? Take a deep breath. This isn’t simple.

In September 2020 cOAlition S made a significant change to its Plan S by adding to it the Rights Retention Strategy (1,2).Readers of PN will be familiar with Plan S as an initiative from a group of European research funders aimed at accelerating the transition of journals from subscription or hybrid models to Open Access (OA) (3).

Up to that point Plan S had been pushing authors in the direction of Gold OA. With Gold OA, the journal publishes the copy- edited, typeset and proofread Version of Record (VoR) of an article and makes it freely accessible with liberal re-use licensing. In return for this publishing service, they are paid by the author, funder, institution or sponsor.

The RRS instead offers an alternative route to author compliance with Plan S, through posting a copy of the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM) in an open repository (so-called Green OA) for access without embargo (so immediately on publication in the journal) and with the same Creative Commons (CC) BY reuse licence as is used for Gold OA.

The instrument the cOAlition S funders have used to open up this route is to change their grant conditions to require that a CC BY licence is applied to all AAMs or VoRs reporting original research, supported in whole or in part by their funding.

The differences between this route and Gold OA are that the AAM is a more preliminary version of the paper and that the journal receives no payment for the article becoming OA. Publishers are concerned that the RRS raises a real risk that if enough of a journal’s content is made free to access and reuse through the AAM/RRS route, libraries will cancel their subscriptions, undermining the journal’s financial viability at a critical point during the transition to the promised land of Gold OA.

Many societies and publishers, while committed to a transition to OA, feel that the RRS is a blunt instrument and risks collateral damage to journals, like The Society’s Journal of Physiology (JP) and Experimental Physiology (EP), that are already on a clear path to Gold OA. They also think it could lead to an inferior, last-resort version of OA based on the AAM (4). Perhaps unsurprisingly, both parties in the debate claim to be defending the author’s right to choose where to publish.

That said, few authors submitting to JP and EP are likely to have to resort to the RRS (The Society’s Physiological Reports was born OA so complies with all funder mandates, everywhere). Phew!

Through Wiley’s read-and-publish agreements our journals comply with Plan S’s OA mandates in most of the countries where the cOAlition S funders are active (in the UK, primarily Wellcome Trust and UK Research and Innovation). For instance, UK universities are covered by the agreement Wiley signed with Jisc last year, and the 10 institutions belonging to the IReL (Irish Research eLibrary) consortium in Ireland are covered by a four- year agreement finalised in March. Wiley also has read-and-publish deals with consortia of academic libraries in Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, Norway and Finland, and with a handful of individual institutions in the US. Authors in institutions covered by read-and-publish deals have a straightforward and, to the author, cost-free route to publishing fully Gold OA (Version of Record, freely accessible, no embargo, CC-BY licence) in JP and EP.

If you’re thinking of submitting a paper to JP or EP (and we hope you are) on research supported by a cOAlition S funder you can confirm compliance with Plan S by using its clever Journal Checker Tool for your combination of journal, institution and funder (5).

The option of Gold OA in our journals is a substantial benefit to authors in terms of wider dissemination and citation.

The endgame for Plan S is that from January 2025 research supported by the participating funders should be published in fully OA journals. Read-and-publish deals are an important step along that path, in allowing authors to comply with their funders’ mandates during the transition and while bedding in new flows of funds within the funder–library–publisher system.

There are still plenty of other issues to be addressed, particularly around ensuring publishing equity for authors and the financial impact on learned societies reliant on their journal income, which is likely to take a hit.

It’s also important to note that OA is only one branch of the Open Science Movement and that The Society’s journals have made steps along other branches, which are arguably more impactful.6 For example, both JP and EP have started awarding Open Science Badges as an incentive in a bid to increase data availability, while EP recently published one of the first Registered Reports in physiology, outlining the journal’s commitment to combatting publishing biases. Moving forward, a form of Open Peer Review may also be on the horizon, as we look to ensure our journals remain at the forefront of best scientific publishing practices. It’s quite a journey, and we will keep members informed as we continue on it.

References

1. https://www.coalition-s.org/
2. https://www.coalition-s.org/rights-retention-strategy/
3. https://www.physoc.org/magazine-articles/plan-s-what-will-the-implications-be-for-the-society/
4. https://oaspa.org/open-post-the-rise-of-immediate-green-oa-undermines-progress/
5. https://www.coalition-s.org/coalition-s-releases-the-journal-checker-tool/
6. https://www.physoc.org/magazine-articles/the-open-science-movement-revolution-is-underway/