Editor’s Note: Roy’s thoughts on the cOAlition S proposal originally appeared in The Scholarly Kitchen
Good intentions can pave many roads.
Can I agree with some of the premises and goals of the proposal? Sure, but “let’s fuel progress by making the scholarly record harder to find, with more burden on the author, with less obvious signals of validation and worse metadata,” said no one, ever.
If enacted, the Plan S proposal would place enormous new burdens on authors. Not only would they need to agree upon and set the standards of quality control, but in “publishing” all scholarly outputs immediately and openly, authors would be forced not only to take responsibility for that quality control but also for the application of interoperable metadata needed to enable each and every output to be discoverable and connected to final results.
A recent MEDLINE data quality assessment by some of my colleagues identified serious challenges in MEDLINE’s records. Would the Plan S proposal ameliorate or exacerbate challenges like this? Will it lead to greater discovery, increased linkage of articles and data, and greater usage and impact for authors? Traditional publishing outlets expend enormous resources on this and, while it has never been easier to disseminate content online, it also has never been harder for materials to be noticed and linked to, e.g., identities, grants, and institutions.
As mentioned in a Scholarly Kitchen post that I co-wrote in May with my colleagues Jamie Carmichael and Jessica Thibodeau, “[s]cholarly research is complex and interconnected; change in one area can spark improvement or deterioration throughout the ecosystem (emphasis added).” In the transition to open science, stakeholders across the ecosystem acknowledge that authors should not have to shoulder an open access administrative burden that takes time away from their actual research. The scholar-led proposal from Plan S seems to overlook this, which is one of the few things that institutions, researchers, funders, and publishers seem to agree upon. Bluntly, being a great researcher does not inherently make you an adept publisher.
Additionally, the proposal’s call for the community — including service providers — to supply open tools and commit funds to sustain the model with little to no return-on-investment is unsustainable. While well-intentioned, this type of approach is a recipe for failure. Adding links, building metadata bridges, and enriching records have real costs that require significant amounts of money. With the required tools already available, a better approach is to invest in their adoption, not to duplicate work by creating new ones.
Scholarly communications are important, which is why its participants have such strong views. Getting communications wrong has real-world consequences, many of which are unintended. Let’s acknowledge this and work together to solve the challenges that we can actually solve without adding complications and entropy.