- What Jisc open access agreements actually negotiate
- The three cOAlition S Plan S compliance routes
- Matching Jisc agreement types to each compliance route
- Common questions from UK research offices
- A practical compliance checklist
- Implications for research offices
- Looking ahead
UK research administrators juggling funder mandates now face a genuinely confusing question: does a given Jisc open access agreement actually satisfy a cOAlition S-aligned funder’s Plan S requirement, or does it only cover the invoice? Jisc negotiates centrally on behalf of UK higher education institutions, but the resulting deals are not automatically interchangeable with Plan S’s own compliance routes — and conflating the two is a common source of avoidable non-compliance findings at grant closeout.
This route map sets out, mechanism by mechanism, how Jisc’s negotiated agreements map onto cOAlition S’s three approved compliance routes and the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) open access policy, so research offices can advise authors with confidence rather than by rule of thumb.
What Jisc open access agreements actually negotiate
Jisc negotiates three broad categories of open access agreement on behalf of its member institutions, governed by the UUK/Jisc Research Licensing Strategy Group and informed explicitly by the principles of Plan S and the OA2020 initiative:
- Transitional (transformative) agreements — convert existing subscription spend into a combined fund covering both continued read access and open access publishing costs at hybrid and subscription titles (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and others).
- Fully open access agreements — membership or flat-fee arrangements with born-open-access and society publishers, including current deals with ACM (2026–2028), MDPI’s Institutional Open Access Program (2026–2027) and PLOS’s flat-fee and Community Action Publishing licences (2026–2027).
- Compliant green agreements — publisher commitments to an immediate, embargo-free, CC BY-licensed repository deposit route for authors who cannot or do not use a paid option.
Springer Nature alone reports over 100 UK institutions participating in its Jisc-negotiated agreement, illustrating the scale of collective bargaining involved. These agreement types are the practical instruments; the compliance routes they need to satisfy come from cOAlition S itself.
The three cOAlition S Plan S compliance routes
cOAlition S launched Plan S in 2018, with implementation beginning on 1 January 2021. Its implementation guidance sets out exactly three routes by which a funded output can be considered compliant. Understanding these routes independently of any single publisher deal is the foundation for everything that follows.
| Plan S route | What it requires | Typical publication type |
|---|---|---|
| Route 1 — Open access venue | Publish in a fully open access journal or platform, immediately available under CC BY | Gold OA / Diamond OA journals |
| Route 2 — Transformative arrangement | Publish in a subscription/hybrid journal covered by a recognised transitional agreement | Hybrid journals under a Jisc transitional deal |
| Route 3 — Repository deposit | Deposit the author accepted manuscript (or, increasingly, version of record) immediately, with no embargo and a CC BY licence, often invoking the Rights Retention Strategy | Any subscription journal, including those with no Jisc deal at all |
Route 3 matters most for institutional risk management: it is the fallback that keeps every author compliant even when no Jisc agreement exists for their chosen journal, or when an agreement’s funding allocation has already been exhausted for the year.
Matching Jisc agreement types to each compliance route
Jisc’s own three agreement categories were designed with these routes in mind, but the mapping is not always one-to-one, and research offices need to check eligibility at the point of submission rather than assume coverage.
| Jisc agreement type | Plan S route satisfied | Practical caveat for research offices |
|---|---|---|
| Fully open access agreement | Route 1 (OA venue) | Confirm the specific journal or platform is listed under the current licence, not just the publisher brand |
| Transitional (transformative) agreement | Route 2 (transformative arrangement) | Fund caps and corresponding-author eligibility rules mean coverage can lapse mid-year |
| Compliant green agreement | Route 3 (repository deposit) | Requires active AAM deposit workflow — Jisc’s Publications Router can automate metadata and full-text delivery to the repository |
UKRI, a founding cOAlition S funder, layers its own 2021 open access policy on top of this framework: immediate open access is required for journal articles and conference proceedings from grants awarded on or after 1 April 2022, and for monographs, book chapters and edited collections from 1 January 2024. UKRI’s policy is designed to align with Plan S principles but is administered separately — an author can be UKRI-compliant via the same Gold, transformative, or Green routes described above, but institutions must check UKRI’s specific embargo and licensing terms rather than assume Plan S compliance automatically satisfies UKRI, or vice versa.
Common questions from UK research offices
What is a read and publish deal?
A read and publish deal is a single institutional agreement, usually negotiated by a consortium such as Jisc, that bundles subscription access to a publisher’s journals with funded open access publishing rights for eligible corresponding authors, replacing separate read and pay-to-publish invoices.
What are the three routes to Plan S compliance?
cOAlition S recognises three routes: publishing in a fully open access journal or platform; publishing in a subscription journal under a recognised transformative arrangement; or depositing the accepted manuscript in a repository immediately, with no embargo and a CC BY licence.
Is the UKRI open access policy the same as Plan S?
No. UKRI is a cOAlition S founding funder and designed its 2021 open access policy to align closely with Plan S principles, but the two are administered separately, with UKRI setting its own effective dates, embargo rules and licensing requirements that research offices must check independently.
Is Jisc’s Open Policy Finder the same as the Journal Checker Tool?
No — they are commonly confused. Open Policy Finder is Jisc’s own tool for checking publisher and funder policies, while the Journal Checker Tool is operated independently by cOAlition S at journalcheckertool.org to confirm a specific journal-institution-funder combination against Plan S routes.
A practical compliance checklist
Research offices advising authors on a submission should work through the following before a manuscript goes out:
- Confirm whether the funder is a cOAlition S signatory, and separately whether UKRI-specific terms also apply.
- Check the target journal against the current Jisc agreement list for the author’s institution and publisher — agreement coverage varies by title, not just by publisher.
- Run the combination through cOAlition S’s Journal Checker Tool to confirm which of the three routes applies before submission, not after acceptance.
- Monitor transitional agreement fund caps; many UK institutions see APC allocations exhausted before the calendar year ends.
- Maintain a documented Green-route fallback — immediate AAM deposit with a Rights Retention Statement — for any journal outside a live agreement.
- Record the compliance route used against each output for funder reporting and REF-adjacent audit trails.
Implications for research offices
The practical risk sits less in the headline agreements than in their edges: mid-year fund exhaustion on transitional deals, journals moving in or out of coverage between renewal cycles, and corresponding-author eligibility rules excluding co-authors at non-participating institutions. Jisc’s multi-year renewals — the ACM Open Journals agreement running 2026–2028, PLOS licences renewed for 2026–2027 — give planning stability, but offices should treat every agreement as time-bound and re-verify eligibility annually rather than relying on a static internal list.
There is also a structural shift underway toward Subscribe to Open and community-based membership models, which remove per-article APC decisions entirely but still require a compliant Green fallback under current Jisc guidance, since S2O agreements depend on enough institutions subscribing to unlock full participation. For research administration teams building durable workflows, the safest design principle is to treat Route 3 — immediate repository deposit — as the permanent baseline, with Jisc’s negotiated Routes 1 and 2 as opportunistic upgrades rather than the primary compliance mechanism.
Looking ahead
As UKRI’s open access policy embeds further into monograph and long-form publishing and Jisc continues renewing its publisher portfolio, the institutions with the least audit risk will be those that stopped treating “which Jisc deal applies” as the first question. The first question should be which Plan S route the output needs to satisfy; the applicable Jisc agreement, if one exists, is simply the most convenient way to deliver it. Research offices that build their author guidance and internal tooling — including terminology drawn from a shared open access dictionary — around the three compliance routes, rather than around individual publisher brands, will adapt fastest as agreements are renegotiated, replaced or allowed to lapse.
