Journal giant Elsevier makes friendly noises about cooperating with Europe’s Plan S (revised Friday), which will make research free to read

“Elsevier fully supports and promotes open access,” Philippe Terheggen, managing director  of its STEM journals says. He recommends people publish in Elsevier’s gold open access journals – which are indeed free to read. It’s just that authors or their institutions have to pay to publish in them.

Plan S permits this, but makes clear that it will not wear publishers just changing their market model, from charging readers to charging authors. The European Research Council states it will, “consider cost controls in our grant award processes (by imposing caps on our funding of charges for publication services).”

And if that ever happens, publishers like Elsevier appear ready, to switch focus from journal income to fee for analytics, using the oft indispensable research resources in their databases.