Introduction

Researchers from Sao Tome and Principe publish articles in international Open Access journals, for example, in 2013, six articles have been published with BioMed Central – an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the Open Access publishing model – by researchers from The Anti-Malaria Team of Taiwan in São Tomé and Príncipe, Centro National de Endemias, São Tomé, Centro Nacional de Endemias, Ministério da Saúde.

There are currently no OA policies registered in ROARMAP .

Enabling Environment

Policies and Projects

In late 2018, the announcement of Plan S jolted the global scientific publishing community. A group of European funders, calling itself cOAlition S , released its provocative statement of intent to terminate all subscription journals and flip the entire scholarly publishing ecosystem to open access (OA).

While publishers and researchers in general agreed with the benefits asserted for open-access publishing, they raised concerns about the specifics of the coalition’s proposal. The Optical Society (OSA) joined the voices offering feedback with a response to the coalition’s request for input.

Two years on, cOAlition S is again attempting to move the needle on a flip to OA with its new “ Rights Retention Strategy (RRS).” Faced with little global uptake of the Plan S approach and some prominent departures from the coalition, the new tactic seeks to speed up a transition away from the traditional subscription-based journal publication model. Here are some things that we believe authors should understand about RRS.

Plan S principles and reality

Plan S rests on ten principles . One of those outlines the coalition’s goal for researchers to publish their work in so-called gold OA journals (in which authors pay a fee to publish), along with a commitment by the funders to cover the associated fees. The principles also focus on the need for authors to publish their work under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, so that their article is available for unlimited reuse—even commercially—without restriction; and to make articles openly available immediately upon publication. OSA currently publishes five journals that meet these criteria: Optica , Optics Express, Biomedical Optics Express, Optical Materials Express , and OSA Continuum . Effective 1 January 2021, cOAlition S members will require funded authors to publish their work in “compliant Open Access journals or platforms.” While gold OA is preferred, funded authors are still permitted to publish in “green OA” journals, which allow authors to repost papers in open-access institutional repositories; or hybrid journals, which include both subscription and OA content—provided that those journals also offer a CC BY license and impose no embargo period between publication and free access. Most hybrid journals, however, use embargos and more restrictive licenses to recoup the costs associated with producing, hosting, archiving and disseminating the content they publish.