Plan S: In service or disservice to society?

OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING — “SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR”

Scientific knowledge needs to be widely disseminated across the globe, for it to be critically analyzed or to be built upon for future studies. The conventional publication model has been less accessible due to prohibitive subscription costs and hence the need arose for the open access model where the readers would have free access. The Open Science movement is not only about open-access journals but also includes open source, open data and methodology, open peer review, open-access indexing, and archiving. The prototype open access model is the gold model where researchers (themselves or supported by grants or funding agencies) pay certain article processing charges and the readers have free access to the content without any restrictions. Additionally, there is a need for free-to-use open-access platforms or repositories like PubMed Central to archive the open-access content. Institutional repository is another way for collecting, archiving, and distributing the scholarly contents of an academic institution. Preprint servers allow archiving manuscripts before they are submitted to or undergo review for publication, and they offer an important platform for freely sharing knowledge. While open-access model looks attractive, it has its challenges. Currently, the change to open-access model has meant the transfer of the financial burden, earlier borne by the readers, to the authors in the form of APCs. Irrespective of the model, there is a need to reconsider the high subscription costs and the article processing charges which are often prohibitive for many. Science must be accessible to the researchers and the public at a reasonable cost without delay.

BJA Open: a new open access journal for anaesthesiology, critical care, and pain medicine

BJA Open is a new open access journal to complement British Journal of Anaesthesia. This editorial describes the rationale for the journal and the breadth of content it is seeking to attract. As with other BJA titles, BJA Open conforms to the highest standards of editorial and publication practice, and it aims to provide sector-leading author experience combined with reliable peer-reviewed content for the reader.

Comprehensive Approach to Open Access Publishing: Platforms and Tools

The Open Access Initiative is gaining momentum due to the worldwide availability of advanced digital tools, online publishing platforms, and systems for tracking academic contributions. Several declarations and initiatives, including Plan S, have already laid a foundation for moving away from subscription to full and immediate open-access publishing. The global initiatives imply targeting journals satisfying the upgraded quality and visibility criteria. To meet these criteria, a comprehensive approach to Open Access is recommended. This article overviews the essential components of the comprehensive approach, increasing transparency, adherence to ethical standards, and diversification of evaluation metrics. With the increasing volume of quality open-access journals, their indexing with free databases and search engines is becoming increasingly important. The Directory of Open Access Journals and PubMed Central currently free searches of open-access sources. These services, however, cannot fully satisfy the increasing demands of the users, and attempts are underway to upgrade the indexing and archiving of open-access sources in China, Japan, Korea, Russia, and elsewhere. The wide use of identifiers is essential for transparency of scholarly communications. Peer reviewers are now offered credits from Publons. These credits are transferrable to their Open Researcher and Contributor iDs. Various social media channels are increasingly used by scholars to comment on articles. All these comments are tracked by related metric systems, such as Altmetrics. Combined with traditional citation evaluations, the alternative metrics can help timely identify and promote publications influencing education, research, and practice.