“Towards Responsible Publishing” (TRP) is a proposal published by cOAlition S in October 2023 that sketches an alternative to the traditional journal-first publishing model. Instead of submitting a manuscript to a journal and waiting for editorial peer review before anything becomes public, TRP envisions researchers posting their work openly first — as a preprint or similar output — with peer review, curation, and refereeing happening afterward, in the open, and under the author’s control. As of mid-2026 it remains a proposal and a strategic direction, not an adopted Plan S requirement or a funder mandate. This guide covers what the proposal actually says, what happened during its community consultation, and how it now sits inside cOAlition S’s own Strategy 2026-2030.
What the proposal is
cOAlition S published “Towards responsible publishing: a proposal from cOAlition S” on 31 October 2023, alongside a shorter summary document. The proposal identifies three problems it says the conventional pre-publication peer-review model creates:
- Delay. Formal peer review at a single journal, especially when it cascades through rejection and resubmission at successive journals, routinely adds a year or more before findings reach the public record.
- Lost information. Reviewer feedback, and the existence of earlier draft versions, is normally discarded or kept private once a paper is accepted — even though that feedback is often where the real scientific error-correction happens.
- Cost and inequity concentrated at the final article. Because publishers’ business models attach almost entirely to producing one polished, “version of record” article, the proposal argues this drives up costs and structurally disadvantages authors and institutions who can’t pay for it, working against equitable open access.
The proposal’s response is to shift control over when and what to make public back to authors, and to treat the scholarly record as something that legitimately includes early versions and review reports, not just a single final PDF. Publishers, societies, and platforms would still have a role — providing peer review, technical services, curation, and archiving — but as services researchers or their institutions choose and pay for, rather than gatekeepers who decide whether work becomes public at all.
How this relates to Plan S
Plan S, launched by cOAlition S in September 2018, mandates that funded research outputs be made openly available immediately on publication, largely by requiring gold open access, green open access with a short embargo, or (until Plan S’s own Rights Retention Strategy made this less necessary) transformative agreements — see CASRAI’s guide to the Rights Retention Strategy for how that mechanism works. Plan S’s original focus, though, was squarely on the final, journal-accepted article: it changed the terms on which that article had to be made available, not the publishing process that produces it. TRP is explicitly framed by cOAlition S as extending that ambition further upstream — from “is the final article open?” to “does the whole process of writing, reviewing, and validating research need to route through a journal’s pre-publication gate at all?” It is best understood as cOAlition S asking a bigger question about scholarly communication, using Plan S’s existing funder leverage and community standing as the base to ask it from, rather than as a new clause added to the Plan S compliance requirements authors and institutions already have to track.
The community consultation (November 2023 – May 2024)
Because TRP would be a much larger change than Plan S’s OA-terms mandate, cOAlition S commissioned an independent consultation before deciding how, or whether, to act on it. Research Consulting and Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) ran the consultation from November 2023 to May 2024, gathering input from more than 11,600 respondents worldwide — researchers, research-performing organisations, scholarly societies, publishers, and infrastructure providers — through surveys, focus groups, and written submissions. The final report was published in December 2024 (openly archived on Zenodo).
The consultation’s headline finding, per cOAlition S’s own summary of the report, was that the global research community broadly appreciates the value of preprints and open peer review and is largely willing to adopt them — but only if those outputs are properly recognised and rewarded in hiring, promotion, and funding decisions, and if the practical workflow (submission systems, discoverability, archiving, interoperability between platforms) is made seamless enough not to add friction to researchers’ day-to-day work. The report gave cOAlition S a set of prioritised recommendations rather than a mandate to implement TRP as written, including a call for cOAlition S to spell out implementation detail and a delivery strategy before asking funders or institutions to change requirements.
Current status: proposal, not policy
As of mid-2026, TRP has not become a Plan S requirement, and cOAlition S has not set a date by which funded researchers or institutions must adopt a post-publication-review model. What has happened is that cOAlition S folded TRP’s ambitions into its broader Strategy 2026-2030, published in November 2025 — see CASRAI’s coverage of that strategy document for the full picture of what it does and doesn’t change. Phase 1 of that strategy (2026-2027) commits cOAlition S to reviewing and updating the Plan S principles and implementation guidance, informed directly by the TRP consultation findings, rather than announcing specific new rules up front. In other words: the consultation closed the loop on “does the community want this,” the answer was a qualified yes, and cOAlition S’s own next step is described as further groundwork (infrastructure, recognition mechanisms, updated guidance) before any requirement gets attached to funding.
Practically, that means research offices and authors currently working under Plan S obligations do not need to do anything differently because of TRP — there is no compliance deadline, no new checkbox on a funder’s open-access policy, and no journal-checker-style tool tied to it. It is worth tracking as a direction of travel, not treating as a live requirement.
What a preprint-plus-open-review model looks like in practice today
TRP is a proposal from a funder coalition, but several publishing models that already operationalise “post first, review after, in the open” exist independently of it and predate or run parallel to it. These are useful reference points for what TRP-style publishing could look like if it were ever implemented at scale:
- eLife’s Reviewed Preprints model, where eLife publishes the preprint alongside public peer reviews and an editorial assessment, without a traditional accept/reject gate.
- Review Commons, which provides publisher-independent peer review on preprints that authors can then carry with them to participating journals.
- Peer Community In (PCI), a free, community-run recommendation layer that reviews preprints without an associated journal fee.
- F1000Research, which publishes first and runs fully open, named peer review afterward.
These are separate initiatives from TRP, run by publishers, platforms, and community organisations rather than by cOAlition S itself, but they demonstrate the mechanics TRP’s proposal describes are already functioning at real (if still comparatively small) scale. ASAPbio’s related “Publish, Review, Curate” (PRC) framework is a similarly-named but distinct effort — it is a general model and set of principles for preprint-centric publishing promoted by the preprint advocacy organisation ASAPbio, not a cOAlition S funder proposal, and the two should not be conflated even though they describe overlapping ideas.
Frequently asked questions
Is “Towards Responsible Publishing” a Plan S requirement?
No. It is a proposal cOAlition S published in October 2023 and consulted the community on through 2024. It has not been adopted as a Plan S compliance requirement, and there is no deadline by which funded researchers must comply with it.
Does TRP replace peer review?
No. It proposes moving peer review to after initial public posting rather than before, and making review reports part of the public record, but it does not propose eliminating peer review itself.
How is TRP different from ASAPbio’s “Publish, Review, Curate” model?
They describe a similar overall shift — post first, review openly afterward — but come from different organisations. TRP is cOAlition S’s own proposal, aimed at what funders could eventually require. PRC is a general framework and set of principles promoted by ASAPbio, a preprint-advocacy nonprofit, aimed at publishers, platforms, and communities more broadly. Neither one has formally adopted or superseded the other.
What happened to the TRP consultation?
Research Consulting and CWTS (Leiden University) ran it from November 2023 to May 2024, drawing more than 11,600 responses from researchers and other stakeholders worldwide. The final report was published in December 2024 and found broad appetite for preprints and open review, conditional on better recognition and smoother workflows.
Where can I read the proposal and consultation report directly?
Both are published by cOAlition S at coalition-s.org, and the full consultation report is openly archived on Zenodo.
