Research Policy Impact

This story is from our May 2023 issue of?The Brief—C&E's monthly newsletter covering professional and scholarly communication.?Read the full issue here.

Research Policy Impact

To date, US and European researchers have largely been shielded from the direct impacts of open and public access funder policies. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s?2008 policy, along with the subsequent?2013 Holdren Memo, were both successful because publishers voluntarily took on the necessary work of depositing papers in agency repositories on authors’ behalf. Even Plan S has bent over backward to reduce the impact on researchers, encouraging?“transformative” journals?and?agreements?to avoid researchers (and perhaps the funding agencies themselves?) having to directly pay article processing charges (APCs). It has attempted?to adapt the policy to not restrict author choice of publication venue?(which is challenging when the central thrust of the policy is to restrict author choice of publication venue). But with many of Plan S’s accommodations sunsetting in 2024, and with the upcoming implementation of the?US federal funders’ Nelson Memo, researchers are just beginning to feel their share of the burden of open science....

Read the full story?and others from our May issue of?The Brief.?Subscribe today?to have the next issue delivered right to your inbox.