Editorial: Open access revisited: Plan S.

I am sometimes asked whether FMT is an open access journal. This seemingly benign and simple question belies one of the most complex and fraught political issues currently being debated in the field of science and research. My answer is: well sort of. FMT is a traditional subscription model academic journal, which, being based in Germany, is also reliant on subsidy. Under this business model, the publisher collects twice: through subscriptions and through publishing subventions, provided until recently by the DFG, which has now, however, largely cancelled its subsidies for academic journals.

The open access movement (OA) argues that scientific research funded by public money should not be protected behind expensive subscriptions but should be available free of charge to public scrutiny. Most scholars, libraries and scientific organisations support this idea in principle, although its execution in practice is much more complicated. The publisher of FMT, Narr Verlag in Tübingen, has begun to react to the open access movement by making older articles freely available online. Currently, the two most recent years are subject to an embargo which means they can only be accessed via subscription. This also applies to university libraries which often provide fulltext access to journals, also to FMT, but only if the library holds an online subscription. As editor of the journal I find myself in the strange situation that I have no digital access to the most recent issues of FMT, even through the formidable subscription holdings of the LMU University library system. LMU does of course subscribe to the journal but has no access, it seems, to the most recent issues. This is because, the LMU is still reliant on an old print subscription without online access. This is only one of the many absurdities currently besetting the jungle of academic journals. FMT is by no means exceptional in this regard but is following a common practice amongst academic publishers to instigate an embargo on the most recent issues.

Last week I received an enquiry from a colleague involved with the new online journal of EASTAP, the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance which had its inaugural conference last November 2018 in Paris. The enquiry was the following:

The members of the journal editorial committee are soliciting advice: they would like to know if the journal should become Open Access after one year, or two years. In other words, should it be available to members and paying readers only for one year, or two years? In addition, they would like to know what price it might be reasonable to charge for access to each article.

My answer to the question was to highlight the many complex issues and solutions that have accrued around the debates over open access. One is confronted by a bewildering number of terms and labels most of which seem to be based on various precious metals: gold, diamond, platinum. These are the expensive solutions, whereas the cheaper variants are coded by colour such as green. This is all very bewildering when you think that the basic idea behind open access is a simple one: publicly funded research should be made available to the public without cost. Behind all this is a fascinating chapter of scientific history which goes back to the early 1950 s when a Czech-born returned British soldier called Ján Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hoch, better known as Robert Maxwell (1923–1991), recognised a huge potential market in publishing academic journals. These had hitherto been mostly low-key, relatively cheap publications by learned societies or academic institutions. Maxwell founded Pergamon Press and proceeded to buy up or found new scientific journals, all of which had to be purchased through expensive subscriptions by the rapidly expanding academic library system. In 1991 Pergamon was bought up by the publishing giant Elsevier which along with Springer and a few other heavyweights is today at the heart of the Open Access struggle. Elsevier in particular charges staggering amounts for its subscriptions to high profile journals with profit margins around 40–50 %. As Maxwell and the publishers following him realised: scholarly journals were effectively a license to...