mobilized to denounce it. The extensive literature on the subject, published in medical journals, bears witness to this [CAM 18].
The most recent research on this new subject reveals that Open Access might be a mechanism by which external actors penetrate and gain a foothold in the scientific communication and publishing scene, and build legitimacy [COB 18; SIL 20]. They also highlight the capacity of Open Access to implement hybridization and thus increase the complexity of publication models, whose intelligibility contributes to the reliability of the information they convey [DIL 18].
1.5. The place and weight of funding agencies in the OA environment
Changes in scientific communication in the digital era and in Open Access have broadened the spectrum of stakeholders, thereby influencing the definition and scope of dissemination models. In Health, in particular, research funding agencies, which historically did not intervene in the definition of scientific information dissemination models, have joined the Open Access equation. Today, they carry a lot of weight, as do publishers, libraries and learned societies.
Funding agencies very quickly began paying attention to the rise of Open Access. The most important among them introduced recommendations in the 2000s; these were directed at funded researchers and stipulated that published results be made available in Open Access. For example, the Wellcome Trust, one of the best endowed agencies in the world, adopted a mandate for Open Access in October 2006 [WAL 06]. Researchers receiving funding were required to provide open access to the results of their research.
The recommendations, clearly in favor of access to and visibility of funded research, are part of a management logic that finds its functional counterpart in the identification of these results in international databases, such as PubMed, Web of Science (WOS) or Scopus. Publications (mainly articles) are therefore not only “units of knowledge” but also “accounting units” [GIN 18] on which economic mechanisms of return on investment (ROI) are based.
Researchers previously invited to publish their results in “excellence” journals adapted and learned to archive their articles in thematic or institutional repositories [FRY 11]. Publishers have also adapted their Open Access policies to allow authors to deposit different versions of their papers (preprint, postprint author, postprint editor) according to specific deadlines and conditions (e.g. Sherpa Romeo).
Open Access journals (based on the Gold Author-Pays model) that appeared in the field of Health were a rapid success with authors who met all the expectations of research assessment: publication of articles in an Open Access journal, guaranteeing the visibility of research results. The authors had no difficulty justifying payment of the APCs from their research budget to the funding agencies. The latter even made it clear in their calls for projects that publication expenses (including APCs) were eligible for funding.
In Health, where research is based on a dual dynamic of collaboration and international competition, the financial stakes are huge; Open Access is therefore at the heart of the strategies of funding agencies (public and private) to give visibility and recognition to the research they have funded. This strategy has therefore been integrative of the various channels of Open Access, while at the same time driving momentum towards new avenues.
1.6. Plan S, a “radicalization”12 of Open Access in Health?
The role of funding agencies took on a particular dimension in September 2018 with the announcement of an international coalition of 13 agencies (including the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche – ANR, French National Research Agency) encouraging researchers to publish in Gold Open Access journals [ELS 18]. The launch of Plan S at the initiative of Science Europe – the association of research funding agencies of the member states – reflects the desire to reinvent the methods of scientific communication by prioritizing the publication of research results from public grants in scientific journals or platforms that respect a number of founding principles of Open Science13.
The announcement was like a thunderclap in the sky of scientific publishing because it took the funding agencies out of the prescriptive role of Open Access dissemination to put them (with the very first draft of Plan S) in the position of favoring one model (Gold and a fortiori Gold Author-Pays) over another (Green representing the Open Archives)
Decried, criticized or welcomed, Plan S is still being debated, two years after its announcement. It is not unanimously supported in all fields14, for obvious reasons of funding mechanisms. However, not all fields rely on project-based research. Furthermore, it has recently been shown [LAR 18] that the funding criterion does not necessarily enter into the researcher’s publication strategy: as soon as authors have the funds to pay for the APC, they prefer to publish in Gold Open Access journals. A fortiori, in Health, where the overwhelming majority of research is project-based, Plan S acts as a catalyst for a restructuring of the scientific communication model around the imperative of access.
The Plan S coalition has been joined by new members including the influential Wellcome Trust; this new policy applies from January 1, 202115. Today, the coalition includes powerful and important public and private funding agencies, who now feel they have a say in how science is communicated and disseminated. In addition to national funding agencies, four private international funding agencies are also associated with Plan S. All four fund Health research: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, World Health Organization, TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, and ASAP (Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s)
Strictly speaking, open access is a property of the written outputs of a specific research project, rather than the publication that hosts such outputs. In other words, it is a property of an article rather than a journal, or of an individual monograph rather than a book series.
But above all, what justifies fears about Plan S is the fact that, while it builds its justification on a rhetoric that borrows from the arguments of Open Access, it undeniably introduces market regulation mechanisms to steer the publication strategy of researchers. The management logic of research is integrated into it, and there is a risk that it does not sufficiently take into account the ethical risks that are their corollary.
1.7. Scientific information in Health: a world of no journals?
Preprint servers are now an integral part of the scientific communication ecosystem in Health [PEN 20]. They have appeared over the last 10 years and illustrate the dynamism and importance of this method of dissemination [TEN 18; PEN 20]. Supported and set up by researcher communities, particularly early-career researchers [NIC 19], these servers represent a new generation of thematic open archives that offer an advanced digital service around preprint.
The most famous are those grouped around the extension “Xiv” of the eponymous archive arXiv, which founded the Green Road of Open Access. Using this extension in their names as a distinguishing mark conveying values, the new preprint servers claim both a filiation and a specific identity [BOU 19b]. In addition to openness, a discursive marker of Open Access, their rhetoric also includes “acceleration” as a strong justification, which indirectly points to the unsuitability of journals to ensure publication within a sufficiently short period of time.
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