By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
Lynn Kamerlin, Bas de Bruin and their colleagues have been the most vocal critics of Plan S from the very beginning, braving continuous opposition from certain OA leaders. Now that final Plan S guidelines were released, the chemists publish this Open Letter expressing their worry about a possible dystopian OA future.
The new ERC President Mauro Ferrari used to closely collaborate with two very controversial cancer researchers at MD Anderson in Texas: Anil Sood and Gabriel Lopez-Beerestein. Will that experience affect ERC’s already wanting stance on research integrity?
A scientifically subterranean topic at Frontiers leads to a discovery of cheater talents in Poland: a duo of EU-funded nanofabricators from Pakistan. Does any of their papers contain any actual research data, or is it all just made up?
Plan S, designed by the former EU Commissioner Robert-Jan Smits, became a complete and chaotic mess where everyone, including the members of the signatory cOAlition S of research founders, does whatever they want. I learned all that while participating at the Academic Publishing Europe (APE) conference in Berlin, on 15-16 January.
I obtained from the EU commission evidence that Smits was at least strongly influenced by Frontiers while designing Plan S. There were meetings with Kamila Markram and other Frontiers representatives, most notably on 25 April 2018, and a string of emails, where Smits requested and received “Frontiers feedback on the transition to OA and APCs”. Updates at the end of this article supply evidence that not only Frontiers did advise Smits on Plan S from spring 2018 on, they were the only stakeholder to do so.
Two and a half years after Maria Fousteri was found guilty of scientific misconduct by her former employer, the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), exactly nothing at all happened. ERC and Molecular Cell ignored LUMC letters from June 2016, while Fouster’s British co-authors interfered to save own papers. Of 4 scheduled retractions, none took place.
A new Open Letter against Plan S appeared on the internet. Presently over 600 scientists are protesting against what they see as a bit totalitarian Open Access initiative by Robert-Jan Smits and his partners from Science Europe. Among the Open Letter signatories are many early career researchers and tenured academics, including two Nobelists.
I obtained a near-verbatim transcript of a video-conference Plan S architects Robert-Jan Smits and Science Europe president Marc Schiltz had on October 19th with Lynn Kamerin and other authors of the Appeal. It appears that Smits and Schiltz see the scientists and their scholarly societies as the reactionary elements blocking the road to the universal Open Access (OA).
I finally succeeded to interview the only woman among Human Brain Project leaders, the scientific director Katrin Amunts. In my previous article, I published a non-interview, using bits from HBP website as stand-in for her answers. Now, in this long read, Professor Amunts provided me with her replies.
This is Appeal by several European scientists protesting against Plan S, recently revealed by the EU and a coalition of European research funders. Lynn Kamerlin and her coauthors worry that Plan S will deprive them of quality journal venues and of international collaborative opportunities, while disadvantaging scientists whose research budgets preclude paying and playing in this OA league. They offer instead their own suggestions how to implement Open Science.
For Better Science