In November 2025, cOAlition S — the funder consortium behind Plan S — published its Strategy 2026-2030, the successor plan to the framework that forced open access onto the agenda of scholarly publishing starting in 2018. Some coverage, including a widely-read Science news piece, has framed the new strategy as a retreat from Plan S’s original strict requirements. cOAlition S’s own materials tell a more complicated story: they describe the plan as reinforcing and expanding the coalition’s ambition, not retreating from it. Both things can be true depending on which part of the document you’re reading. This piece works through what the strategy document actually says, sourced directly from coalition-s.org, so research offices and publishing-policy staff can separate the real substance from the framing war around it.
What cOAlition S published, and when
The Strategy 2026-2030 was released in November 2025 as both a full document and a shorter summary PDF, alongside a press release positioning it as the coalition’s “next strategic phase.” cOAlition S describes the plan as the product of extensive member consultation and stakeholder engagement, developed seven years after Plan S’s 2018 launch and roughly five years after its 2021 implementation deadline. The strategy runs in two phases: Phase 1 (2026-2027), described as foundational work covering digital infrastructure, membership services, and a review and update of the Plan S principles and implementation guides; and Phase 2 (2028-2030), which the document says will be shaped by Phase 1’s outcomes and will deepen the coalition’s work on equity and sustainability. Notably, the document commits to reviewing and updating Plan S’s principles and implementation guides as a Phase 1 action rather than announcing specific rule changes up front — which matters for how you should read the “retreat” framing below.
The three strategic priorities
cOAlition S names three priorities for 2026-2030:
- Reinforcing the foundations for full, immediate, sustainable, and equitable open access to peer-reviewed articles.
- Supporting digital infrastructure that enables open access, including the systems that make compliance monitoring and reporting workable at scale.
- Exploring financially sustainable and equitable publishing systems, with an explicit commitment to tracking their performance and outcomes rather than mandating a single model outright.
The real shift: one mandated route becomes “a multitude of routes”
The clearest substantive change is in how the strategy talks about compliance pathways. Plan S’s original 2018 mandate required funded outputs to be immediately open access via one of three defined routes: publication in a fully open-access journal, publication in a hybrid journal under a qualifying transformative agreement, or self-archiving via the green route. The Strategy 2026-2030 instead commits cOAlition S to “endorse and advocate for a multitude of routes to open access,” explicitly on the grounds that no single model can meet every discipline’s or region’s needs. Three models get named specifically as alternatives that sit alongside, and in the coalition’s messaging increasingly ahead of, conventional APC-funded gold open access: Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) models, in which review and curation happen openly on top of a preprint rather than inside a traditional journal; Diamond open access, where neither authors nor readers pay; and preprints paired with emerging forms of open post-publication peer review. That is a real change in emphasis from a plan built around a small number of prescribed compliance routes to one that explicitly elevates non-APC, non-transformative-agreement models as first-class options.
What cOAlition S says versus how it has been read
It’s worth being precise about the disagreement in framing, because it’s easy to collapse into a single headline. cOAlition S’s own press release frames the update as reinforcement: it reaffirms the “foundational mission of accelerating full and immediate open access” and explicitly adds new dimensions — transparency in process, equity in participation, and trustworthiness of scientific knowledge — describing these as additions to the mission, not replacements for the original compliance mandate. Nowhere in the coalition’s own materials does it announce that CC BY licensing, immediate deposit, or the underlying compliance expectation is being dropped. What it does do is (a) broaden the set of routes counted as compliant beyond the original three, (b) defer specific changes to Plan S’s implementation guides to a Phase 1 review rather than legislating them now, and (c) shift a large share of the coalition’s stated energy toward infrastructure-building and non-APC models rather than enforcement of the original 2018 rules. Science‘s news coverage characterized this combination as a retreat from Plan S’s strict requirements — a characterization CASRAI has not been able to independently verify against the full article text, so we present it here as one outlet’s framing rather than as an established fact. What is independently verifiable, directly from coalition-s.org, is the substance above: more routes, deferred specifics, and a rebalanced set of priorities. Readers can reasonably describe that as either a broadening or a softening depending on which original requirement they’re measuring against.
What doesn’t appear to be changing
The Rights Retention Strategy, which lets authors apply a CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript regardless of the publishing journal’s own policy, is not flagged in the strategy or the press release as being scaled back — if anything, it is the kind of author-side, publisher-agnostic mechanism that fits comfortably inside a “multitude of routes” framing rather than being at odds with it. Compliance monitoring itself is also not going away: digital infrastructure to support it is one of the three named priorities. The distinction that matters for research offices is between the compliance obligation, which the strategy does not announce as ending, and the compliance routes counted as satisfying it, which are visibly widening.
What this means for research offices in practice
Through 2026-2027, treat the Strategy 2026-2030 as a signal of direction rather than a rulebook change: cOAlition S has said it will review and update the Plan S principles and implementation guides during Phase 1, but has not yet published revised guides as of this writing. Institutions with cOAlition S-funded researchers should keep following current Plan S compliance requirements and Rights Retention Strategy guidance as they stand today, while watching for the promised implementation-guide updates. The practical takeaway for anyone advising researchers or negotiating publishing agreements is that Diamond OA and Publish-Review-Curate venues are likely to carry more explicit funder legitimacy going forward than they did under the original 2018-2021 Plan S rollout, which was built almost entirely around the gold/hybrid/green compliance framework. For background on how a binding funder mandate differs from a non-binding policy statement — a distinction that matters when reading any funder’s compliance language, including cOAlition S’s own — see CASRAI’s OA Mandate vs. OA Policy comparison. For the fuller landscape this strategy sits inside, including the 2023-2025 rise of Diamond OA infrastructure and Subscribe-to-Open, see CASRAI’s related analysis, Plan S and Diamond OA: where the open-access conversation is going.
