Overview

The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is the world’s only large-scale, high-level, multi-stakeholder effort focused on developing an inclusive, achievable, sustainable approach to global scholarly communication reform.

Over 400 leaders in scholarly communication have engaged with OSI since 2015, representing 250 institutions from 27 countries and 18 unique stakeholder groups.

OSI-affiliated experts have assessed, analyzed, scrutinized and debated extensive perspectives and information on open access through conferences, summit meetings, dozens of reports, and thousands of emails.

Plan A synthesizes the significant themes and recommendations that have emerged via these OSI activities. Plan A recommends that the international scholarly communication community begin immediate and significant action to:

• DISCOVER critical missing pieces of the open scholarship puzzle so we can design open reforms more effectively;
• DESIGN, build and deploy an array of much need open infrastructure tools to help accelerate the spread and adoption of open scholarship practices;
• WORK TOGETHER on finding common ground solutions that address key issues and concerns (see OSI’s “Common Ground” policy paper for more detail); and
• REDOUBLE OUR COLLECTIVE EFFORTS to educate and listen to the research community about open solutions, and, in doing so, design solutions that better meet the needs of research.

In pursuing these actions, our community should:

• Work and contribute together (all stakeholders, including publishers);
• Work on all pieces of the puzzle so we may forge a path for open to succeed;
• Discover missing pieces of information to ensure our efforts are evidence-based;
• Embrace diversity;
• Develop big picture agreement on the goals ahead and common ground approaches to meet these goals; and
• Help build UNESCO’s global open roadmap (described here).

Plan A recommends that the community’s work in this space be:

• Common-goal oriented;
• Accountable;
• Equitable;
• Sustainable;
• Transparent;
• Understandable;
• Responsive to the research community.

It is vital to broader society to make research more open and our approaches must be developed carefully and in close collaboration with each other. In doing so, we will ensure that scholarly research is protected during this transition, and that it is well-served by the outcomes of our efforts.