The Journal Checker Tool: How Authors Verify Plan S / Funder Compliance Before Submitting

The Journal Checker Tool (JCT) is a free, public search tool built by cOAlition S that lets an author check, before they submit a manuscript, whether a specific journal offers a compliant route to meeting a specific funder’s Plan S-aligned open-access policy. It answers one narrow, practical question — “if I publish in this journal, with this funder and this institution, will I be compliant?” — rather than explaining Plan S policy in general. This page covers how the tool itself works step by step, what its three outcomes and three compliance routes mean, and how it differs from institutional APC-workflow platforms such as ChronosHub. For the underlying policy the tool is checking against, see CASRAI’s guide on cOAlition S’s Plan S and Responsible Publishing proposals and the cOAlition S dictionary entry.

What the Journal Checker Tool Actually Does

cOAlition S released the Journal Checker Tool in beta on 18 November 2020, built with a technical partner (Cottage Labs) following an open tender. It is hosted at journalcheckertool.org and is separate from, and free to use independent of, any commercial publishing-workflow vendor. The tool has two parts: a back-end that harvests and caches data from a number of external sources (journal policy registries, publisher and funder agreement data) and runs a compliance algorithm against it, and a front-end search form most users interact with directly. Because the underlying data is cached and “refreshes regularly” rather than being queried live from every source on every search, cOAlition S is explicit that the tool reflects its current understanding of journal and funder policies and states it does not accept liability for errors or omissions in that data — a result is a strong starting signal, not an unconditional guarantee, and cOAlition S’s own guidance is to treat a compliance check as something to revisit close to submission if time has passed.

How Authors Use It: The Three Inputs

The search form asks for up to three pieces of information:

• Journal — required, and the journal must have an ISSN for the tool to evaluate it; journals without one (some very new or non-traditional venues) cannot currently be checked.
• Funder — optional but recommended; this is the funder whose Plan S-aligned policy the author needs to satisfy.
• Institution — optional but recommended; some compliance routes (notably certain Rights Retention Strategy arrangements and some transformative agreements) are institution-specific, so leaving this blank can return a less precise or “Unknown” result than including it.

cOAlition S’s own documentation notes that neither Funder nor Institution is strictly required for the algorithm to run — a search with just a journal name will still return a result — but the more of the three fields an author fills in, the more specific and reliable the answer, since compliance in Plan S is genuinely a function of the combination, not any one field alone. An author who works with more than one funder, or who is unsure which institutional agreements apply, gets the most accurate picture by running the check separately for each funder/institution pairing that’s relevant to the manuscript.

Reading the Result: Compliant, Non-Compliant, or Unknown

For a given funder/institution/journal combination, the tool returns one of three outcomes, along with the reasoning ( a short audit trail of which data points drove the determination):

• Compliant — at least one route to Plan S compliance is available for this specific combination.
• Non-Compliant — no route the tool can identify makes this combination compliant with the stated funder’s policy.
• Unknown — the tool doesn’t have enough cached data to determine an answer either way; this is common when Funder or Institution is left blank, or when a journal’s policy data hasn’t been captured or refreshed yet.

An “Unknown” result is not the same as “Non-Compliant” — it means the tool couldn’t compute an answer, not that it computed a negative one. cOAlition S’s guidance for an Unknown or ambiguous result is to check directly with the funder, institution, or publisher rather than assume either outcome.

The Three Routes to Compliance the Tool Checks

Plan S defines three routes by which a publication can be compliant, and a “Compliant” result tells the author which route (or routes) applies to their specific combination:

• Route 1 — Open Access journals and platforms. The journal or platform is itself fully open access, so publishing there directly satisfies the policy without any further action from the author.
• Route 2 — Self-archiving. The author publishes in a subscription (non-OA) journal but makes the author accepted manuscript (or in some cases the published version) openly available in a repository, immediately and under an open license — either because the publisher’s own self-archiving policy permits this, or via cOAlition S’s Rights Retention Strategy, under which the funder requires the author to retain sufficient rights to deposit regardless of the publisher’s own self-archiving terms. CASRAI’s practical guide on self-archiving for green open access covers the deposit mechanics this route relies on.
• Route 3 — Transformative arrangements. The journal is covered by a qualifying transformative agreement (TA) between the publisher and the author’s institution or consortium, or the journal itself is registered as a transformative journal committed to converting to full OA on a defined trajectory. CASRAI’s guide on how read-and-publish and transformative agreements work for authors covers this route from the author’s side in more depth.

A given journal can be Compliant via more than one route depending on the funder and institution entered — for example, a subscription journal might be Non-Compliant on its own general self-archiving policy but Compliant once a specific institution’s transformative agreement or Rights Retention arrangement is factored in, which is exactly why the Institution field matters.

A Step-by-Step Walkthrough

1. Go to journalcheckertool.org before finalizing a submission decision, not after a manuscript has already been accepted — checking early means there’s still time to choose a different venue or route if the first choice isn’t compliant.
2. Enter the target journal by name or ISSN. If the exact ISSN isn’t known, the search typically resolves from the journal’s name, but using the ISSN of the specific journal (not a sister/companion title) avoids ambiguity.
3. Enter the relevant funder. If the manuscript reports on work funded by more than one Plan S-aligned funder, run the check once per funder — a route compliant for one funder is not automatically compliant for another, since each funder can set its own embargo, license, and route restrictions within the Plan S framework.
4. Enter the author’s institution, since this is what allows the tool to factor in institution-specific transformative agreements and Rights Retention arrangements rather than only generic publisher policy.
5. Read the result and, if Compliant, note which specific route applies — Route 1, 2, or 3 — because each has different practical obligations (e.g., Route 2 requires the author to actually complete a repository deposit; it isn’t automatic just because the option exists).
6. If the result is Non-Compliant or Unknown, either select a different venue, confirm eligibility for the Rights Retention Strategy with the institution’s OA office, or contact the funder directly — don’t submit on the assumption that a Non-Compliant or Unknown result will resolve itself later.

What the Journal Checker Tool Is Not

The JCT is a compliance-lookup search engine, not an institutional workflow or payment platform. It doesn’t submit anything on the author’s behalf, doesn’t process article processing charge (APC) payments, doesn’t manage licensing paperwork, and doesn’t track an institution’s agreement usage over time. That operational, institution-facing layer is a different category of tool: platforms like ChronosHub exist specifically to route APC funding requests, monitor how an institution’s transformative-agreement caps are being used, and hand off billing — the workflow that begins once an author already knows, often via a JCT check, which route they’re pursuing. The two tools are complementary rather than competing: the JCT answers “is this combination compliant, and via which route,” a question any author (even one without institutional access to a vendor platform) can ask for free; an institutional platform then handles the administrative follow-through once that route is chosen. Neither CASRAI’s earlier ChronosHub review nor cOAlition S’s own JCT documentation describes the two as integrated with each other by default — treat them as two separate steps in the same overall process unless a specific institution has configured otherwise.

Limitations Worth Knowing Before You Rely on It

• Coverage depends on cached third-party data, which can lag a publisher’s or funder’s most recent policy change.
• Journals without an ISSN cannot be evaluated.
• An “Unknown” result reflects missing data, not a negative determination — don’t read it as “Non-Compliant.”
• cOAlition S states explicitly that it does not accept liability for errors or omissions in the tool’s output, so a Compliant result is strong guidance, not a substitute for confirming with the funder or institutional OA office when a submission decision is high-stakes or time-sensitive.
• The tool checks Plan S-aligned funder policies specifically; a funder that has not aligned its policy with Plan S, or a non-Plan S mandate (some national or institutional OA policies operate independently of cOAlition S), may not be represented in the tool at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Journal Checker Tool free to use?

Yes. It’s a public tool provided by cOAlition S at journalcheckertool.org; no institutional login or subscription is required to run a search.

Do I need to enter my institution to get an accurate result?

It’s optional but strongly recommended. Some compliance routes — particularly certain Rights Retention Strategy arrangements and institution-specific transformative agreements — only appear in the result once an institution is specified; leaving it blank can return a less specific or “Unknown” answer than the full picture actually supports.

What does an “Unknown” result mean, and what should I do about it?

It means the tool doesn’t have enough data cached to determine compliance either way, not that the combination is non-compliant. cOAlition S’s own guidance is to check directly with the funder, institution OA office, or publisher when a result comes back Unknown.

Does the Journal Checker Tool handle my APC payment or licensing?

No. It only checks compliance and reports which route applies. Payment, licensing, and agreement administration are handled separately — by the publisher directly, by an institution’s OA office, or via an institutional platform such as ChronosHub.

What if my funder isn’t listed or the journal shows as Non-Compliant?

Confirm directly with the funder before ruling out the venue — the tool’s data can lag a recent policy update, and some funders operate mandates outside the Plan S framework the tool is built to check. If a genuinely Non-Compliant result is confirmed, the practical options are choosing a different journal, publishing via the Rights Retention Strategy where the funder supports it, or seeking a funder-approved exception.

How is the Journal Checker Tool different from checking a publisher’s own self-archiving policy directly?

A publisher’s self-archiving policy alone doesn’t account for funder-specific requirements like the Rights Retention Strategy, or institution-specific transformative agreements that can make an otherwise non-compliant journal compliant for a particular author. The JCT combines all three factors — journal, funder, and institution — into a single compliance determination rather than requiring the author to cross-reference each policy source manually.