Political economy of Plan S: a post-foundational perspective on Open Access

ABSTRACT Plan S, promoted by cOAlition S, is a significant attempt to hegemonize a specific form of Open Access (OA) as the future of academic publishing on a global level. It mandates that the results from Coalition-funded research must be published in fora compliant with its criteria. This article questions the Plan’s supposed radicalness from a political economy perspective with the help of post-foundational discourse theory. Specific attention will be paid to its implications for property rights as the contingent foundation of knowledge production. The Plan and OA will be examined within the context of globally unequal structures of scientific knowledge production and attempts to transform them into a more equal system. The analyzed data consist of the archive from the following sequence: (i) the publication of draft guidance on the implementation of the Plan, released by the Coalition in November 2018, (ii) a collection of feedback statements on the draft by the Coalition from November 2018 to February 2019, and (iii) release of the updated guidance adopted and published by the Coalition in May 2019. The primary object of analysis is the antagonism articulated towards the Plan within what is here termed the conservative-propertarian discursive formation.