The Radicalism Is the Point
More bad ideas from cOAlition S, proving that they exist only to be more radical than the last time
A day after the White House issued an Executive Order from President Biden about the governance of AI, in which the word “responsible” and its variants appear 35 times, the radically irresponsible people driving Plan S issued an even more extremely reckless and counterproductive plan than the one that has degraded scientific publishing in myriad ways — one which could utterly destroy any sense among the public that scientists and researchers care about anything but themselves, and which would repel the public from science and make it less likely to be accessed or trusted.
The plan is described in Nature as one that would encourage “all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports to be published openly from the outset, without authors paying any fees, and for authors, rather than publishers, to decide when and where to first publish their work.”