Learned societies publish journals primarily to serve their scholarly communities, more recently some of them have also managed to make a surplus which they also use to support their other mission activity. These two aspects of journal publishing are both mission related, of course, and the balance between them varies considerably depending on the society. The Royal Society only started making appreciable surplus from the journals in the 21st century; for over 300 years the journals were heavily loss making. Open access is clearly the future and the Royal Society is very supportive of open science in general. Last year, over 45% of all our articles were immediate OA. Clearly institutional and funder support for OA is a crucial driver and while we welcome the greatly increased impetus Plan S has provided, we have concerns about the way the policy will be implemented. As the national academy of science, our primary concerns will always be the good of science and the interests of scientists. We are therefore concerned that Plan S is likely to have negative consequences for early career scientists, for collaboration and for the level of support for OA in the research community.
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