The Leatherby Libraries’ Coordinator of Scholarly Communications & Electronic Resources, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker, recently co-hosted a webinar titled “Defining Plan S and Transformative Agreements” with DeDe Leshy, the Senior Medical Library for Electronic Resources at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The webinar was hosted by the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) Scholarly Communication Committee, of which both presenters are members, to serve as a primer on these two important facets of current events regarding open access in academic libraries and institutions.

Plan S is an initiative launched in September 2018 by the European Research Council with the cooperation of 13 national research funding organizations and 4 charitable foundations. It aims to require that scientific publications and other research outputs that were funded by public grants provided by any of the participating funders be published in compliant open access journals or platforms. The webinar covers the details of the plan and its development to the present day, as well as the reactions of various publishers, researchers, professional organizations, and other participants in the scholarly publishing landscape.

Transformative agreements are contracts that seek to shift subscription fees for scholarly research publications (often paid by libraries) from subscription-based reading fees toward open access publishing. The webinar addresses a variety of ways that this can be achieved and details existing or in-progress transformative agreements between commercial publishers and academic institutions or consortia in the United States and Europe.

SCELC is a consortium of over 300 member and affiliate institutions that coordinates resource sharing and shared licensing for electronic resources, often at a discount from what libraries would pay to acquire resources on an individual basis. It also fosters a number of advisory committees, such as the Scholarly Communication Committee, which collaborates on ways to advance scholarly communication opportunities related to open access, open educational resources, and more to its member libraries.

To view a PDF of the presentation slides or watch a stream of the presentation with full audio, click here.

(Image from https://www.coalition-s.org/)