- What Is cOAlition S and How Is It Governed?
- The Leaders Group: Where Plan S Policy Is Set
- The Executive Steering Group, Director, and Secretariat
- Answer-First: Common Questions on cOAlition S Governance
- Member Funders and the Science Europe Connection
- What This Means for Institutions, Publishers, and Researchers
What Is cOAlition S and How Is It Governed?
Research administrators tracking open-access compliance often ask who is actually behind Plan S decisions. The cOAlition S Leaders Group is the top decision-making body of cOAlition S, the international consortium of research funders that launched Plan S in 2018 to mandate immediate open access to publicly funded research.
cOAlition S itself has no autonomous legal capacity. It is, in its own words, “an informal alliance of organisations and institutions that fund and/or perform research activities” whose members have publicly committed to implementing Plan S principles. That single fact shapes everything else about its governance: policy is agreed collectively, but enforcement remains the legal responsibility of each individual funder.
Governance runs through three tiers: the Leaders Group sets strategy, the Executive Steering Group implements it, and a secretariat provides day-to-day operational support. Two supporting bodies — an Experts Group and a network of Open Access Ambassadors — feed technical advice and community feedback into the process.
The Leaders Group: Where Plan S Policy Is Set
The Leaders Group is composed of the heads of cOAlition S member organisations — national and regional research funders, philanthropic funders, and the European Commission. It approves the coalition’s overall strategy, agrees the principles that Plan S-aligned policies must follow, and appoints both the Executive Director and the Executive Steering Group.
As of 2026, the Leaders Group is chaired by Mari Sundli Tveit, Chief Executive of the Research Council of Norway and President of Science Europe — a dual role that illustrates how tightly cOAlition S governance and Science Europe leadership now overlap.
A sample of Leaders Group representation, drawn from cOAlition S’s published governance list, shows the geographic and institutional spread involved:
| Member organisation | Country / region | Leaders Group representative |
|---|---|---|
| Research Council of Norway | Norway | Mari Sundli Tveit (Chair) |
| Research Council of Finland (AKA) | Finland | Floora Ruokonen |
| French National Research Agency (ANR) | France | Claire Giry |
| Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) | Slovenia | Mirjam Dular |
| European Commission | European Union | Marc Lemaître |
| Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) | Portugal | Francisco Santos |
| Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) | United States (philanthropic) | Bodo Stern |
| Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) | United States (philanthropic) | Randy Schekman |
Membership turns over as staff change roles, so the current, authoritative composition is always the governance list published on coalition-s.org rather than any secondary source — including this one.
The Executive Steering Group, Director, and Secretariat
Below the Leaders Group sits the Executive Steering Group, which translates approved strategy into an operational work plan and supervises the cOAlition S Office. It is chaired by Lidia Borrell-Damián, Secretary General of Science Europe — again reflecting the close personnel overlap between the two bodies.
Day-to-day leadership sits with the Executive Director, who leads the Executive Steering Group and acts as the coalition’s principal spokesperson. Leadership has changed hands recently: Johan Rooryck stepped down in July 2025 after six years in the role, a period that saw the coalition’s fastest growth. Curt Rice, a former university rector, was subsequently appointed Director in May 2026 to lead strategy implementation.
Operational and financial support is provided by the secretariat, which is appointed by and reports to the Leaders Group. The secretariat’s hosting arrangement has itself shifted: cOAlition S functions moved from the European Science Foundation to OPERAS AISBL, a Brussels-based research infrastructure for open scholarly communication, which now hosts the cOAlition S Secretariat.
The coalition’s own published figures show its office budget has contracted sharply as activities matured: total spending fell from roughly €1.12 million in 2022 to €545,167 in 2025, with staffing dropping from 3.5 FTE (2022–23) to around 2 FTE in 2025, partly reflecting the sunsetting of the Journal Comparison Service in early 2025.
- Leaders Group — policy-making and strategic direction
- Executive Steering Group — implementation and oversight of the work plan
- Secretariat (OPERAS AISBL) — finance, operations, communications
- Experts Group — technical and policy advice
- Open Access Ambassadors — community outreach and feedback
Answer-First: Common Questions on cOAlition S Governance
Who sits on the cOAlition S Leaders Group?
The Leaders Group is made up of the heads of cOAlition S member organisations — national and regional research funders, philanthropic funders, and the European Commission. It approves overall strategy, agrees Plan S principles, and appoints the Executive Director and Executive Steering Group.
What does the cOAlition S Executive Steering Group do?
The Executive Steering Group turns Leaders Group strategy into an operational work plan and supervises the cOAlition S Office. It is chaired by the Secretary General of Science Europe, while the coalition’s Executive Director leads day-to-day delivery and public representation.
Who is the current director of cOAlition S?
Curt Rice was appointed Director of cOAlition S in May 2026, succeeding Johan Rooryck, who stepped down as Executive Director in July 2025 after six years leading the coalition through its period of fastest growth and expansion.
Where is the cOAlition S secretariat based?
The cOAlition S Secretariat is hosted by OPERAS AISBL, a research infrastructure for open scholarly communication based in Brussels, Belgium. It replaced the European Science Foundation as host and now provides operational, financial, and communications support to the coalition.
Member Funders and the Science Europe Connection
cOAlition S is frequently — and inaccurately — conflated with Science Europe, the Brussels-based association of European research funding and research-performing organisations. The two are formally distinct bodies with separate mandates, but the overlap in senior personnel is real and consequential: both the Leaders Group chair and the Executive Steering Group chair currently hold senior Science Europe positions.
This overlap matters for institutions tracking policy signals. When Science Europe’s governing board discusses open-access principles, the same individuals frequently carry those positions into cOAlition S Leaders Group meetings, and vice versa. Research offices monitoring funder mandates should therefore treat Science Europe statements and cOAlition S announcements as related but not interchangeable — each body has its own decision process and its own binding effect on individual funders’ policies.
Member funders span national research councils (Norway, Finland, France, Slovenia, Portugal, among others), the European Commission, and private philanthropic funders such as HHMI and ASAP. Each retains full legal responsibility for enforcing its own open-access policy — cOAlition S coordinates the principles, but compliance monitoring (for example through the Journal Checker Tool) happens at the level of the individual funder.
What This Means for Institutions, Publishers, and Researchers
For research administration and funder-compliance teams, the practical implication is that Plan S obligations are not centrally enforced. Institutions should track the specific published policy of whichever cOAlition S funder supports a given grant, rather than assuming a single unified cOAlition S rulebook applies everywhere.
For publishers, the leadership transition to a new Director in 2026, alongside the secretariat’s move to OPERAS, signals a period of operational change rather than a shift in Plan S’s core open-access principles. The coalition entered a new 2026–2030 strategic phase that reaffirms open access while broadening its remit toward “rapid, open, transparent, and equitable” sharing of research more generally — a scope expansion worth watching for anyone tracking open-science mandates rather than open-access mandates narrowly.
For anyone building funder-compliance workflows, the governance map is straightforward once separated into its three tiers: strategy (Leaders Group), implementation (Executive Steering Group and Director), and operations (Secretariat). Understanding which tier issued a given statement helps determine whether it reflects settled policy or an in-progress work plan.
