Re: https://www.hifa.org/dgroups-rss/open-access-20-q4-how-would-you-design-...
Dear Chris (Zielinski) and all,
Thank you for introducing Plan U whereby funders would mandate that research results must always be posted on an openly accessible preprint server before they are submitted to a journal.
I just read an interesting blog on this topic: 'Is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s new OA policy the start of a shift towards preprints?'
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2024/04/09/is-the-bill-an...
Extracts and a comment from me below.
EXTRACTS
'The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (the second largest charitable foundation in the world) recently announced a new open access (OA) policy. They will require articles resulting from work they fund to be posted as preprints and no longer cover fees for their publication in academic journals. This shift in focus from the peer-reviewed journal article to preprints aligns with a proposal called Plan U and marks a significant policy change for a major funder. It comes at a time of much discussion about the future of academic publishing, as journal peer review is coming under increased scrutiny and some are questioning whether it’s necessary at all...
'The academic community has been arguing about OA for almost three decades. Few dispute that articles reporting research findings should ideally be freely accessible to anyone. How exactly to achieve this, in particular how OA should be paid for, has been hotly debated...
'In the model favoured by commercial journal publishers and, until recently, many funders and OA advocates, publication costs are covered by article processing charges (APCs) levied on the authors. But these merely shift the access barrier from readers to authors...
'A solution to the access problem has however been staring at us in the face for years: preprints, draft versions of articles that have yet to go through the expensive and time-consuming journal peer review process...'
COMMENT (NPW): A potential downside to Plan U is that it may drive a substantial increase in poor-quality research. This could be mitigated by editorial screening processes (perhaps using AI to detect spam, plagiarism etc). Also, it will be essential for all papers to be clearly labelled in terms of whether or not they have been through peer review (and the process this peer review comprises). The preprint does not seek to replace peer review, but may lead to different models of subsequent review as compared with the current dominant journal model of a few peer reviewers to assess the paper. Whether or not Plan U would lead to better informed healthcare professionals is debatable. It can be argued that a healthcare professional should seldom if ever base a clinical decision on a single peer-reviewed research paper. This warning would apply even more so to a preprint that has not been peer reviewed.
Another consideration is the impact on journal publishing and how the relation between preprints and journals would evolve. Any thoughts?
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org