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Why, if sharing the VoR is preferred to the AAM, doesn’t cOAlition S mandate it?

In developing the Rights Retention strategy, we are mindful that the AAM version differs from the VoR. Not only does the latter contain all the changes from the copyediting process, journal formatting/branding etc., but it is also the version maintained and curated by the publisher, who has the responsibility to ensure that any corrections or retractions are applied in a timely and consistent way. For this reason, our preferred option is to ensure that the VoR is made Open Access. In cases where this version can be made available in accord with the Plan S principles, many cOAlition S Organisations make funding available to pay for these services in the form of APCs and contributions to transformative arrangements.

 However, we do not wish to mandate that the VoR is made available for the following reasons:

One, if we consider the price charged to make a VoR available – via, say, the Transformative Journal route, is neither fair or reasonable, we want to ensure that our funded researchers can still seek to publish in that journal, and comply with our OA policy by making the AAM open access with a CC BY licence. If we mandate that researchers have to make the VoR available then we would be obligated to pay any price set by the publisher.

 Two, there may be cases where a publisher does not provide the full suite of services we require when a publishing fee is met by a funder.  Examples of services funders will typically require of the publisher include depositing the VoR in a specific repository and agreeing to update the article in that third party repository if the original article is subject to corrections/retractions. If a publisher was not willing to provide these services, but we had mandated that researchers have to make the VoR available then we would be obligated to accept a service which didn’t meet our requirements.