- What “EU-Funded Projects” Actually Lists on cOAlition S’s Site
- How cOAlition S and the Horizon Europe Mandate Overlap
- Where cOAlition S Rules Still Add to the Horizon Europe Baseline
- Common Questions from Grantees
- A Practical Compliance Checklist
- What This Means for Institutions
- Outlook
Search “cOAlition S EU-funded projects” and you land on a page that is easy to misread. It does not list the projects cOAlition S funds for grantees — it lists the European Commission grants that fund cOAlition S itself. That distinction matters for research administrators trying to work out which obligations actually attach to a Horizon Europe grant, and which belong to the separate, funder-driven Plan S mandate that the European Commission helped create.
This piece reads that page on its own terms, then answers the practical question institutions actually have: given that the European Commission’s own Horizon Europe open access mandate already exists, where — if anywhere — does cOAlition S add anything a grantee still has to act on?
What “EU-Funded Projects” Actually Lists on cOAlition S’s Site
cOAlition S’s “EU-funded projects” resource page catalogues five Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 grants awarded to the European Science Foundation and partner consortia to build the infrastructure and evidence base around Plan S — it is not guidance aimed at individual grant recipients. Each entry names the funding call, the EU contribution, the duration and the coordinating institution.
| Project | Funded under | EU contribution | Duration | Coordinator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OA-Advance | HORIZON.4.2 | €132,000 | 2024–2025 | European Science Foundation (France) |
| SOAR | H2020-EU.5.e. | €299,930 | 2020–2023 | European Science Foundation (France) |
| DIAMAS | HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-43 | €3,000,000 | 2022–2025 | Aix-Marseille University (France) |
| CRAFT-OA | HORIZON-INFRA-2022-EOSC-01-02 | €5,000,000 | 2023–2028 | University of Göttingen Library (Germany) |
| PALOMERA | HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-ERA-01-42 | €2,000,000 | 2023–2025 | OPERAS (Belgium) |
The through-line is instructive: the European Commission is not a passive observer of Plan S. It is a funding partner for the studies (OA-Advance’s independent review of Plan S impact), tools (SOAR’s support for identifying compliant venues) and Diamond open-access infrastructure (DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA, PALOMERA) that keep the mandate operable. That funding relationship is the real answer to how cOAlition S and Horizon Europe are connected — and it is the fact most generic summaries of Plan S skip entirely.
How cOAlition S and the Horizon Europe Mandate Overlap
The European Commission is itself a cOAlition S member, alongside national funders including several that fund UK-based and other associated-country researchers, and the Horizon Europe open access mandate is, in substance, the Commission’s own implementation of Plan S principles inside its Model Grant Agreement. Both frameworks require:
- Immediate open access to peer-reviewed publications, with no embargo period.
- Deposit of the publication, or the accepted manuscript, in a trusted repository at the time of publication.
- A Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, or equivalent, on journal articles and conference papers.
- Author retention of sufficient rights to comply, regardless of what a publisher’s default policy allows.
Because these baseline requirements are shared, a grantee who satisfies the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement’s open access clause will, in almost all cases, also satisfy Plan S. This is why cOAlition S materials describe Horizon Europe as an aligned implementation rather than a competing regime.
Where cOAlition S Rules Still Add to the Horizon Europe Baseline
Alignment is not identity. Three areas where the two frameworks are not simply interchangeable deserve attention from institutional research offices.
Scope beyond the grant. Plan S is a funder mandate: it binds a researcher’s Plan-S-relevant output for as long as they hold funding from a cOAlition S member, not only the outputs tagged to a single Horizon Europe grant number. A researcher holding both a Horizon Europe grant and, say, a Wellcome or Research Council of Norway award is subject to the combined Plan S obligations of every cOAlition S funder involved — the Horizon Europe clause alone does not cover that.
The compliance route. cOAlition S operationalises compliance through the Journal Checker Tool, which tells an author whether a specific journal, for their specific funder and affiliation, satisfies the mandate via the fully open access “Gold” route, a compliant transformative agreement, or the self-archiving Rights Retention Strategy route. The Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement states the requirement; the Journal Checker Tool is the operational instrument grantees actually use to verify a chosen venue — and it is a cOAlition S resource, not an EC one.
Article Processing Charges in hybrid venues. Horizon Europe funding rules do not reimburse APCs for publishing in hybrid journals — subscription titles that also sell open access on a per-article basis — only in fully open access journals or platforms, including the Commission’s own Open Research Europe platform. Plan S’s broader principle is the same, but grantees who assume “my publisher offered an open access option” is automatically fundable frequently discover the hybrid exclusion applies regardless of which mandate they cite.
Common Questions from Grantees
What is an EU funded project?
An EU-funded project is a research or coordination activity receiving a grant from a European Union programme such as Horizon Europe or its predecessor, Horizon 2020. In cOAlition S’s own case, five such projects — OA-Advance, SOAR, DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA — fund the coalition’s open access infrastructure and evidence base, not individual researchers’ compliance.
Can the UK apply for EU funding?
Yes. The UK re-associated to Horizon Europe from January 2024, meaning UK-based researchers can again apply for and hold Horizon Europe grants directly. UK recipients follow the same open access mandate as any other beneficiary, alongside any separate Plan S obligations from UK funders such as UKRI or Wellcome.
Is cOAlition S the same body as the European Commission?
No. cOAlition S is a voluntary alliance of national and private research funders, of which the European Commission is one member among roughly two dozen. The Commission sets Horizon Europe’s own grant conditions independently, but has aligned them closely with Plan S principles as part of that membership.
Do Horizon Europe grantees need to follow Plan S separately from their grant agreement?
Usually not in substance, since the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement already embeds Plan S’s core requirements. Grantees should still check Plan S obligations separately whenever a co-funder, prior grant, or institutional mandate outside Horizon Europe applies to the same publication.
A Practical Compliance Checklist
For research offices triaging a Horizon Europe-funded manuscript against both frameworks, the practical questions are the same regardless of which document a grant officer cites:
- Does the venue offer immediate open access with no embargo — checked directly, not assumed from the journal’s general reputation?
- Is a CC BY licence (or CC BY-NC / CC BY-ND for a monograph) applied to the published or accepted version?
- Has the author retained rights to deposit the accepted manuscript, independent of the publisher’s standard licence terms?
- If the venue is hybrid, has the team confirmed the APC is not eligible for reimbursement under Horizon Europe rules before committing funds?
- Do any other cOAlition S funders co-fund the same output, requiring a combined compliance check beyond the Horizon Europe grant alone?
What This Means for Institutions
The practical risk is not that Horizon Europe and Plan S conflict — it is that research offices treat “we’re Horizon Europe funded, so we’re covered” as a substitute for checking the venue, licence and co-funder picture on each output. Teams that build Journal Checker Tool and rights-retention verification into submission workflows, rather than relying on the Model Grant Agreement clause as a proxy, catch hybrid-APC and multi-funder edge cases before they become a post-award finding.
For teams supporting research administration workflows across multiple funders, the EU-funded projects underpinning cOAlition S’s own infrastructure — particularly DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA’s work on Diamond open access publishing — are also worth tracking directly, since they signal where funder-preferred, no-fee publishing routes are likely to expand over the current Horizon Europe programming period.
Outlook
With DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA running through 2025 and 2028 respectively, and OA-Advance’s independent review due to feed recommendations on what comes after Plan S, the EU-funded projects on cOAlition S’s own page are best read as a forward signal rather than a static resource list. Institutions tracking them alongside their Horizon Europe grant terms — rather than treating the two frameworks as separate compliance tracks — will be better placed as Diamond open access infrastructure matures and funder mandates converge. CASRAI’s open research terminology reference provides further grounding for related definitions.
