Biophysical Society Bulletin | May 2020

Publications

Know the Editor Padmini Rangamani

Open Access: Funder Mandates

University of California, San Diego Editor, Cell Biophysics Biophysical Journal

Last month’s article outlined open access publishing at the Biophysical Society: what it is, how it works, and what options are available for open access publishing at BPS. This article will provide a brief and simplified overview of two initiatives involving funder mandates. Plan S News and discussions about Plan S have dominated the science publishing world for the last few years. Plan S is the initiative put forth by cOAlition S, a group of primarily European funding bodies that support scientific research. Plan S requires that, “With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional, and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.” For the last two years or so, Plan S has been a confusing, shifting, and complicated initiative that generated more questions than answers from publishers. Current details about the coalition and Plan S can be found on the website https:/www.coalition-s.org; however, two principles of the program have been of particular concern to publishers such as the Biophysical Society: “cOAlition S funders will not financially support ‘hybrid’ Open Access publication fees in subscription venues.” Biophysical Journal is a hybrid journal and as such authors funded by Plan S signatories are not permitted to publish there. When we looked at the impact on the journal almost two years ago, there were about 7–8 percent of authors sup- ported by Plan S funders. These are BPS members who would not be permitted to publish in Biophysical Journal , which is one of the many reasons the Society is planning to launch a fully open access journal to serve its members (see last month’s article). “Authors may publish in a subscription journal and make either the final published version (Version of Record [VoR]) or the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) openly available in a repository.” This, obviously threatens the 6–12-month embargo policy that most subscription journals rely on to secure subscription revenue. Plan S encourages publishers to transition subscription-based journals to open access through “transformative agree- ments” — complicated licensing agreements negotiated with individual institutions and consortia around the world. It is

Padmini Rangamani

What are you currently working on that excites you? I’m currently working on models for physical simulations of the different aspects of structural plasticity in dendritic spines. Dendritic spines are small bulbous structures that protrude from dendrites in neurons and are sites of synaptic activity. Despite their small size, they have very rich biophys- ics — signaling, membrane mechanics, actin remodeling, organelle dynamics — you name it, they do it! I find these structures fascinating. Working on these models has led me to incorporate new areas into my research program from computational math and graphics. There is so much we don’t know and I’m learning a lot each day both in terms of science and techniques. How do you stay on top of all the latest developments in your field? Given the volume of research that is put out every day, this is a challenge. I’m subscribed to table of content emails for many journals and browse through them to find papers that I’m interested in (not necessarily just topics I’m working on) because I like to read very broadly. My group has a Twitter account and I find papers to read on science Twitter every day. These days, websites like ResearchGate make it easy to find updates. Of course, making time to read carefully is another story altogether. I set aside dedicated time in my calendar to read everyday and try to read at least one paper each day. Some days work better than others for this purpose depend- ing on other responsibilities or deadlines, but I try to protect my reading time. One other thing we do in my group is a group think — if there is a new topic we want to learn about, each of us will read three or four papers and explain it to the rest of the group. That way, we get quickly caught up on 30- 40 seminal papers in the field. This has been great fun for us.

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