The EU Plan S for Open Access to Scientific Research

The EU and China have an ambitious new plan to provide open access (OA) for scientific papers:

Since the September 2018 launch of the Europe-backed program to mandate immediate open access (OA) to scientific literature, 16 funders in 13 countries have signed on. That's still far shy of Plan S's ambition: to convince the world's major research funders to require immediate OA to all published papers stemming from their grants. Whether it will reach that goal depends in part on details that remain to be settled, including a cap on the author charges that funders will pay for OA publication. But the plan has gained momentum: In December 2018, China stunned many by expressing strong support for Plan S.

What I'm most excited about here is the implication it could have for content aggregation, open data, and open publication platforms like Polar.

First, research could be easily accessed which means obtaining a copy of the PDF is as easy as clicking a link.

Second, there are a lot of collaborative features that could be enabled here including document clustering, content recommendation, collaborative filtering, etc.

I'm hopeful the closed science community suffers a heavy loss here as science and closed access are inherently incompatible.

Posted on: Jan 03, 2019
Polar Team

Written by Polar Team
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