Plan S. Pardon impossible to execute

TL;DR

This paper estimates the costs and challenges faced by Belarus and Ukraine in transitioning to open access publishing, highlighting under-investment and proposing a method to calculate necessary expenses for open access adoption.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate the costs of open access transition for countries, based on analysis of publications and funding data from Belarus and Ukraine.

Findings

Belarus and Ukraine are under-investing in open access support.

Estimated costs for full open access coverage are significant.

The method can aid in planning transformative agreements for developing countries.

Abstract

The Plan S initiative is expected to radically change the market of scholarly periodicals, resulting in the abandoning of the subscription model in favour of the open access model. This transition poses new challenges, as well as sets new tasks for researchers, managers, librarians and scientific publishers, particularly in countries with transforming economies. In this study, we set out to estimate approximate costs and future prospects associated with the transition of Belarus and Ukraine towards open access to scientific information on the example of publications by researchers from these two countries in Elsevier journals. To this end, we accessed the Scopus database and selected all papers affiliated with Belarus and Ukraine published by Elsevier journals in 2018. Subsequently, we established which of these articles indicated a corresponding author from Ukraine or Belarus, as well as collected journal titles, correspondence addresses, access types and the APC fee for each article. In addition, funding sources were established for each open access article. This allowed us to determine the total amount of money that Ukraine and Belarus would have needed to pay so that all the articles of their researchers, which were published in Elsevier journals in 2018, were available in an open-access form. The obtained results show that Belarus and Ukraine are currently under-investing in the support of scientific publications and subscription to scientific resources, which is necessary for making a transition to the model of open access to scientific literature. The proposed method for calculating the expenses of publishing papers written by researchers from a given country in open access can be used in the preparation of transformative agreements with developing countries.