CAPI T ULO II SOCIEDAD COMANDITA
2.3 CARACTERISTICAS GENERALES DE LA SOCIEDAD COMANDITA
The development, motivations for, responses to and implementation of Plan S provide an excellent example to illustrate the use of collective action and collective good governance. Plan S is a policy initiative, supported by an international consortium of research funders called cOAlition S (coalition-s.org), originally from a set of European funders to accelerate progress towards full and immediate Open Access to formal research publications. Firstly, Plan S is an example of collective
action amongst funders as meso-actors. It was supported by a coordinating institution, Science Europe (scienceeurope.org), through which a range of European funders collaborate. The existence of such a coordinating institution is an important part of how those funders worked together.
The original funders are a group that have worked collectively together over a long period and have similarities in scale and motivations. They are the European funders that have set the strongest Open Access policies in the past. An important part of the motivation behind Plan S has been a frustration amongst these funders about the pace of change. With respect to Olson’s (Olson 1974) modes of achieving collective action, this is an example of a small group that seeks to have the influence and capital to drive action by others. Collectively, by coordinating policy and implementation they seek to both accelerate change within their own fundees, and more importantly, perhaps, to draw in additional funders to their agenda. The question of how rapidly progress is made may depend on the extent to which the funders could be thought of as an oligopoly in their space. While they do not control the majority of global or even European funding they could be argued to have significant prestige capital and influence, and within specific countries (most notably the UK) Plan S
signatories do amount to an effective oligopoly on project-based funding.
It is not an accident that Plan S started in Europe. The central coordinating role played by Science Europe and the greater coordination amongst European meso- actors more generally play an important role in
supporting collective action. The existing policy agenda set out through the Commission and its funding programmes has created conditions where there is a broad alignment on pursuing an Open Access agenda. By comparison, coordination in the USA is generally not amongst agencies but driven by top-down policy agendas.
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Open Scholarship and the need for collective action Institutions and collective action
This is exacerbated by various key US funding agencies being located in quite different government departments. Existing coordination institutions that support negotiation are an important contributor to collective action and the difference between those institutions in each location has significant effects. In Europe these include Science Europe, the European Commission and European Union, and various
university groupings including the League of European Research Universities (LERU) (leru.org) and the European University Association (EUA) (eua.eu). In the US, the National Academies and mission groupings such as Ivy+, Big 10 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Ten_ Universities), Association of Land Grant Universities (ALGU) (aplu.org) and others play similar roles.
Responses
From the perspective of collective action the more than 600 responses to the Plan S implementation consultation (cOAlition S 2019) are also interesting. Firstly, essentially every response starts with an affirmation of support for Open Access. This is a substantial shift in the narrative from a time when many organisations would have been dismissive of Open Access as an agenda. Open Access is mainstream, even inevitable, and the Plan S announcement played a significant role in driving that shift.
Secondly, virtually every response follows up its support with a ‘but’ and it is of course these objections where the majority of the implementation challenge lies. A detailed analysis of those responses is out of the scope of this book but it is helpful to note that challenges are broadly divided into technical (arising mostly from repository providers and advocates), financial/economic (arising from those with significant financial stakes in the transition, primarily incumbent publishers and publisher income-dependent organisations), and social (usually describing concerns around ‘quality’ from organisations with social and prestige capital, primarily scholarly societies, or concerns about career paths and how
shifts in practice might play into perceptions of quality and how they relate to funding and appointments, mainly from early career researcher groupings). These concerns are generally expressed at the meso- level, in terms of the sustainability of an organisation or community of practice, or in terms of the resourcing needed to achieve these goals. Strategic and system level (ie macro-level) responses are relatively rare. These primarily focus on the question of infrastructure provision, funding, coordination and therefore on collective action.
The collective action challenges of implementing Plan S
Achieving the kind of cultural change that Plan S aspires to requires many things to shift in a coordinated way. The challenge and opportunity for a coordinated initiative like Plan S (and many initiatives for Open Scholarship) is the disparate communities that need to be aligned. Focusing purely on disciplinary communities, it is clear that some are already very engaged in Open Access, and Open Scholarship more broadly, and receptive to increasing the pace of change. Some disciplinary communities are resistant, in both passive (not engaging with their options for Open Access) and in some cases active (objections to specific aspects of the implementation plan such as licensing) ways.
Other communities, including incumbent publishing services providers, may be interested in either
channelling implementation into specific pathways (such as APC-based services), or simply slowing
implementation down. The latter puts them precisely at odds with the funders seeking to drive change as rapidly as possible. Scholarly societies that are dependent on publishing income, as we have noted, have a tension to resolve if they are to both be
representative of their scholarly communities’ interests and to maintain their financial sustainability.
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Open Scholarship and the need for collective action Institutions and collective actionThe argument around Plan S, and Open Access more generally, has a tendency to devolve to one of simple dichotomies: green vs gold, APCs vs subscriptions, invest in publishing services or in ‘infrastructure’. A collective action framing suggests a different model for deciding on investment. Success ultimately depends on communities (disciplinary, geographical, stakeholders) deciding for themselves to adopt an Open Access agenda. This means investing in enabling systems, but also with limited resources it may mean selecting those communities that are strategically positioned to lead change. Investment in systems and institutions that support a broad range of communities (for instance, national or regional read and publish funding
agreements, or technical platforms for publishing) may be useful but such systems will need to be
infrastructural (ie invisible to end-users) or a case will need to be made that these are relevant to the broad range of communities they are intended to serve. A significant problem with many of these institutions, including repositories, publishing platforms and various types of funding arrangements, is that they have been (rightly or wrongly) rejected by a range of disciplinary communities.
A logical tactical response to this situation is for those wishing to slow down implementation to make a case to such communities that ‘one size does not fit all’ and that ‘systems from the sciences are no use to
humanities and social sciences’. Viable responses to this tactic include making a strong case for seeking to engage fully with these disciplines, and also actively investing in projects and systems that support those communities that are working for change in otherwise unengaged disciplinary groupings. One advantage of a focus on humanities and social science disciplines is that these remain tight communities that are small enough to reach and support through change, and the relevant scholarly societies are not as dependent on subscription publishing income. This makes those that are, or can be, convinced of the value of a shift towards
Open Access better placed than many groupings in the sciences to plan and coordinate the collective action necessary.
A final consequence of the collective action view is to see the implementation process as a negotiation. The implementation will not be easy or comfortable, and it is unlikely to go smoothly. Those actors with an interest in derailing or controlling the process will seek to amplify the challenges as collective action and coordination are easy to block. The necessary response is a tight tactical focus on communities that are well placed for change and laying the groundwork to make change for a broader set of communities easy in the future. The global aspirations for Plan S are a challenge to delivering collective action. At the same time the expansion of the narrative and aspiration beyond Europe is important for many European scholarly communities. This line may be challenging to tread and communicate effectively. Alliances with other regional initiatives may be valuable here, mirroring again Ostrom’s (Ostrom 1991) prescription for nested hierarchies of governance.