Open Access Update

30 May 2019

BERA continues to monitor developments around Plan S and open access. Our Executive Director is part of a small AcSS working group of learned societies and also contributing to a Wellcome Trust funded research project looking at the implications. We are also working with other societies as part of the newly formed Society Publisher’s Coalition. We remain concerned at how current proposals might negatively impact UK researchers’ freedom to publish in a journal of their choice, researchers from the global south, the pathways to publications for practitioners and ECRs as well as the financial sustainability of journals and learned societies. Some of these concerns were outlined in the AcSS’s response to the UKRI consultation earlier this year.