The Tool
Practical skills assignment
- Take the course on Open Access Publishing at fosteropenscience.edu.
- Use the Plan-S Journal Checker Tool to check the compliance of the last five papers that were published by your lab. If you aren’t in a lab, check the last five scientific papers you were assigned to read for anything except this class. Also for each of these papers, check the journal’s website for the APC policy. How much would an author have to pay to make a paper in this journal Open Access, right now?
- Find a paper (not by you or your own lab) that was published ‘Green Open Access’ (self-archived by the author, freely available in the last submitted version, and possibly after an embargo period). Can you get access to both the free and the published paywalled versions? Where? How do they differ?
- Look up the Google Scholar profile of a senior scientist whose work you know well. Are all of their papers compliant with funder mandates for Open Access, according to Google Scholar?
In your response paper, describe what you did in fulfilling this practical activity, and any snags you encountered.
Then give your critical evaluation of Open Access publishing models. How will these changes improve science? What are the remaining challenges?
Useful Links and Resources
- PLOS: Public Library of Science (publisher).
- Open-access publisher PLOS pushes to extend clout beyond biomedicine. Nature NEWS, May 2021.
- Do you obey public-access mandates? Google Scholar is watching. | Nature NEWS, March 2021.
- How Unpaywall is transforming open science. | Nature NEWS, April 2018.
- https://unpaywall.org
- My love-hate of Sci-Hub. | Science, Marcia McNutt.
- Nature’s Guide to Plan-S. April 2021.
- Data visualization: international open access policies and change over time.
- SPARC Africa on SPARC Open.
- Wikipedia’s list of open-access journals.
- Directory of Open Access Journals.
- One database of funders’ requirements for Open Access (UK).
- Another database of funders’ requirements for Open Access (US).
- Ramírez-Castañeda, V. (2020). “Disadvantages in preparing and publishing scientific papers caused by the dominance of the English language in science: The case of Colombian researchers in biological sciences.” PloS one, 15(9), e0238372.
