Professionals in the Triangle discuss “Planning for Plan S” at recent SSP Regional Event

On April 25th, scholarly publishing professionals from around the Triangle gathered at the SSP Durham Regional Event at the Research Square headquarters for a moderated panel discussion entitled ‘Planning for Plan S’.

Since the Open Access initiative was launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, publishing industry stakeholders have struggled to make sense of—and prepare for—Plan S. Plan S has an upcoming 2020 deadline and is poised to impact nearly every sector of publishing and the research communities they support.

The event’s four speakers on the panel, Micah Vandegrift (NC State Libraries), Allison Belan (Duke University Press), William B. Coleman (ASIP), and Dr. Gregory P. Copenhaver (UNC: Chapel Hill) discussed the challenges and potential benefits of Plan S, coming from library, publisher, and researcher backgrounds.

Major topics discussed included:

• The approaching 2020 deadline and whether a quick shift to global OA is beneficial to the entire ecosystem
• How scholarly societies must adapt to achieve sustainability in an OA world
• Read and Publish/Publish and Read deals
• Where humanities and university press publishers fit into the discussion, and the infrastructure needed to support the titles and research in this new environment
• Alignment among stakeholders as key to achieving any change in the publishing landscape
• The role of funders and universities in incentivizing researcher behavior
• Educating researchers about their rights, Open Science, and OA publishing
• How to handle copyright licensing

We look forward to continuing to discuss the impacts of Plan S on the scholarly publishing community.

Speakers:
Allison Belan, Associate Director for Digital Strategy and Systems, Duke University Press
William B. Coleman, Executive Officer, American Society for Investigative Pathology
Micah Vandegrift, Open Knowledge Librarian, North Carolina State University
Dr. Gregory P. Copenhaver, Professor, Department of Biology, UNC Chapel Hill; Distinguished Adjunct Professor, Fudan University; Editor-in-Chief, PLOS Genetics
Megan M. McCarty (J&J Editorial) and Molly Hansen (Oxford University Press)