Consultations

 

  • BSC response to the 2 questions of the February 2019 Coalition S Plan S consultation (open access)

Is there anything unclear or are there any issues that have not been addressed by the guidance document?

The British Society of Criminology is a membership body operating as a learned society in the field of criminology.  We do not receive public funding – except in, as a charity, being exempt from paying tax on our income – and are non-profit making with all funds being ploughed back into our educational aim.

We believe section 4 of Plan S in particular is under developed in terms of exploring the mechanisms by which the funders intend to replicate the quality of existing publications in its open access models.  While we understand that it may be difficult to write in detail to address an arena that spans the working methods of many different countries, we feel the Coalition S itself has a responsibility as a power-wielding group to do more to understand the structure and imperatives of the publishing industry and academic community and model predictable outcomes and unintended consequences and field initiatives to address the emerging issues before implementing Plan S.  As it stands, the Plan financialises many of the relationships involved and thus reduces the complex interplay of motivation, working procedures and business models currently in play.

We ourselves partly own one journal and support another through buying printed copies for our members – because, despite the assertion within the Plan that everything is read digitally now, our printed copies remain popular and not just with our members overseas.    All of our journal’s royalties are fed back not just into our charity’s work as a whole but into publications in particular.  The reason we maintain a journal cannot be reduced to finance therefore; it is to help shape and encourage our discipline, which is still emerging though expanding apace in the universities of this country and abroad.  This shared aim to develop the discipline of criminology is the galvanising force ensuring that we attract the high-quality editorial teams and peer reviewers that we do.  In the current model: this work is pro bono – many hours of unpaid work, completed at weekends and in the evenings – that the Plan S financialised model is failing to address.  Academics welcome the plurality and plethora of current publication methods giving researchers, both publicly-funded and not publicly- funded, academic freedom to choose where to disseminate research findings.  Plan S talks of hybrid journals but does not address the position of hybrid research articles that draw on work that has been publicly-funded but also that that was not. Some of our members feel that having a list of approved journals smacks of totalitarian states and will adversely skew the publishing and citation of research in that the power to accept/reject will be concentrated to the few to the detriment of opposing/radical views.

Are there other mechanisms or requirements funders should consider to foster full and immediate Open Access of research outputs?

The British Society of Criminology is a membership body operating as a learned society in the field of criminology.  We do not receive public funding – except in, as a charity, being exempt from paying tax on our income – and are non-profit making with all funds being ploughed back into our educational aim.

As a charity whose charitable aim is to increase public education about criminology, we support the principles of open access for publicly-funded research, particularly to the wider public and to those researchers without the institutional backing which funds access to the literature including discipline practitioners, who form some of our membership.

We welcome therefore the Plan S commitment to ensure funders encourage open access by funding that access.

However, we do not believe that the Plan S requirement towards Open Access covers sufficient accessibility criteria.  The commitment seems to centre on financial imperatives and the rather narrow accessibility aim of ensuring academic articles are available free of charge to those who might want to read them.  We do not believe that many practitioners and members of the public have the time or necessary academic training to want to access the material in a format intended for fellow academics.  Therefore, we believe that the Plan S Coalition should commit to ensuring that funding is also committed to make the material not just physically accessible but accessible in the wider sense of being in a format likely to be read and promulgated by the public at large.  This could additionally mean jointly funding a publicly-usable information management system and database with a sophisticated search engine mechanism for interested parties to locate topic areas rather than specific articles in specific journals.

February 2019