DSpace Open Access Repository Plan S Compliance

Unrestricted and immediate Open Access to funded research is at the heart of Plan S. The detailed principles and implementation guidelines contain a number of important details repository managers need to be aware of.

Try out Atmire's Plan S Compliance Quiz

Test your knowledge of the Plan S principles and implementation guidelines by visiting the items in our special Plan S Compliance Quiz collection. For each of the items in the collection, figure out whether its repository record is Plan S compliant or not, and why. Further down in this article, you can find the solution for each item. One hint: make sure you look at both the simple item view, as well as the metadata in the Full view!

Item 1: Findings causing a paradigm shift in a particular scientific discipline

The first item is NOT Plan S compliant. There is an embargo on the uploaded PDF, which is in direct contradiction with the most basic founding principle of Plan S.

Item 2: Effective replacement strategies for the submission of metadata through electronic forms

The second item is NOT Plan S compliant. In order to comply, the uploaded PDF must either be the Version of Record (VoR) or the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM). While it is great that preprints and submitted manuscripts are being shared in repositories, it is of key importance that the final peer reviewed article is made available.

Item 3: Throughout my professional life, Open Access is all I ever wanted

Even though item 3 is publicly available, the correct compliance assessment here is that the item is not part of the current scope of Plan S. Monographs and book chapters will be addressed at a later point. Right now, Open Access to book chapters is not undersigned by the Coalition S signatories.

Item 4: An investigation into Plan S compliance

From all the listed items, item 4 is the only one that is fully Plan S compliant. As a very brief recap of the Principles and Implementation Guidelines, this means in a nutshell that:

• The uploaded file is either the Version of Record (VoR) or Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM)
• The uploaded file is free to download, at date of publication
• The uploaded file is accompanied by a CC-BY license
• The journal or open access platform where the article was originally published, is listed in DOAJ and is transparent about its review and editorial processes.
• Funder and grant information are included in the metadata.
• The repository metadata is licensed under CC0
• The Open Access status and license should be machine readable.

DSpace and Open Repository features supporting Plan S

Every installation of Open Repository comes with the features of the UK RIOXX patch. This includes a special step in the submission process where funder and grant information can easily be registered onto the item. The funder lookup gives access to the entire registry of funders in fundref, counting over 18000 funders today.

As part of the item submission process, a user can also easily set a Creative Commons license.

Contact us today

Atmire can assist you on the road to Plan S compliance for your institutional repository. Get in touch with our team today.

Caveats

Expert readers may have spotted following abstractions / simplifications in the quiz:

• The standard is not yet set for the "machine readability of open access status". In this sense, the RIOXX field date of first open access is a powerful tool, same as the NISO free to read field. In this article and quiz, we didn't go into the details of the RIOXX exposure through DSpace OAI-PMH, especially because it is unknown at this point whether this will be adopted as a standard for Plan S. But as soon as your article is available, there will be a way in DSpace to properly crosswalk it to any standard.
• Even though the records on demo.openrepository.com receive a handle, we are aware that they are currently not resolving. Our demo site is still a demo repository and not an actual institutional repository.
• To be Plan S compliant, the repository needs to be registered in OpenDOAR. Our demo repository isn't, so if your answer/assessment would be that none of the items is compliant because of this, you are 100% correct. As said, this is an abstraction and a demo repository
• More? Did you find other nuances or caveats? Please let us know !!!