Plan-S: Requirements and Challenges

Open Access (OA) movement has been started in the 1990s aiming to access to the all scholarly literature. In order to follow the OA in horizon 2020, it was scheduled that all scientific publications and related data that result from research funded by public grants must be accessed and shared to the whole society without any restrictions. In order to implementing this goal, an initiative for the OA publishing was launched in 2018, named Plan S, which was supported by Coalition S, an international consortium of research funding to make the OA to research publications. The idea introduced after the Berlin declaration on the OA (2004) that have emphasized to access and share research outputs and their related data. Therefore, national and international organizations made some decisions in order to support this plan. According to our evaluations, it is reveal that regarding to several actions in recent decades on the OA, some considerations on the publication copyrights and their ownerships especially outputs generated form publicly funded research are continued. On the other hand, with emphasize of Coalition S protocol to access to the research outputs and their related raw data, some critical considerations should be stated, include organizational, individual, legal, behavioral, and cultural parameters. Consequently, due to all of these challenges, it seems that universal demand on open science and access to the scientific literature has been increased in the recent years, therefore, research policy makers and funders might to consider their situation concerning this decision.