CORE welcomes Plan S

CORE welcomes the objectives of Plan S to advance openness in all research subject fields as described in its ten principles. Plan S, which was initiated by a coalition of 11 European research funders aims to further the adoption of open access to European funded research. 

September 2018 saw the launch of Plan S, an initiative supported by the European Commission and various national public funding bodies (“cOAlitionS”) who, from 2020, will require that all articles by their grantees must be published immediately OA. The policy aims to accelerate the transition to OA with 10 principles and builds on an implementation guideline that aims to articulate a comprehensive operational roadmap for all stakeholders: funders, repositories, publishers and learned societies.  A revised guideline, following a public consultation, is due in May 2019.

Plan S is an Open Access policy that is supported by many institutions and scholarly communications communities. CORE supports the principles of Plan S, benefits from the implementation of Plan S and last but not least can contribute to the implementation of Plan S. 

CORE’s mission is to aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public through a set of services. 

We identified the following areas in which CORE can contribute to the implementation of Plan S:

• monitoring deposit of articles in repositories, as well as compliance to funder policies and measuring the time lag between deposit and publication/acceptance which is the unique capability of CORE;
• helping repositories to be interoperable with standards via CORE Repository Dashboard which allows institutions to ensure data in the repository is exposed correctly in line with applicable standards (OAI-PMH, Dublin Core, ResourceSync), troubleshoot data delivery issues and validate metadata against RIOXX ;
• enriching the aggregated data with Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) using a set of external databases, including Crossref, Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), PubMed rand ORCID. Another CORE’s ability is to link bibliographic data to full text deposits;
• linking of metadata and bibliographic records to open access full text in repositories and in CORE 
• providing open APIs to enriched content aggregated from repositories. 

There is also a set of Plan S requirements that are likely to positively affect CORE, resulting in CORE being able to deliver more value to its users. These include:

• explicit Open Access licenses to content remove barriers for CORE aggregating even more content;
• deposit of text-mineable formats (JATS XML) makes CORE even more valuable for global analyses and text-mining;
• requirement for repositories to expose PIDs describing entities, such as funders, grants, funding programmes and researchers makes CORE more valuable for funders to monitor and understand the impact of their actions. 

CORE is a not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University and Jisc. CORE benefits from Plan S and at the same time Plan S increases CORE’s value to the community.