- What Is the Plan S Journal Checker Tool?
- How to Use the Journal Checker Tool: A Step-by-Step Walkthrough
- The Compliance Routes the JCT Checks
- Where the Tool’s Compliance Data Comes From
- What This Means for Authors, Institutions and Publishers
- The Outlook: JCT After the Plan S Review
What Is the Plan S Journal Checker Tool?
The Plan S Journal Checker Tool (JCT) is a free, web-based service that lets an author check, in a single query, whether a chosen journal offers a compliant Open Access route under a specific funder’s Plan S-aligned policy. It was commissioned by cOAlition S, the international consortium of research funders behind Plan S, and built and maintained by Cottage Labs following a public tender in 2020. The tool went live for open community testing in November 2020 and has run continuously since.
Unlike a generic journal-finder that matches a manuscript abstract to plausible venues, the JCT answers a narrower and more consequential question: given this journal, this funder and (optionally) this institution, does a compliant publishing route exist right now? That distinction matters because Plan S compliance is contractual — getting it wrong can put grant funding at risk.
How to Use the Journal Checker Tool: A Step-by-Step Walkthrough
The JCT’s compliance algorithm takes three inputs, only one of which is strictly required:
- Journal (required) — identified by its ISSN; the search box also accepts journal titles and resolves them to an ISSN internally.
- Funder (optional) — matched against a Crossref funder ID; omitting it still returns routes that do not depend on funder policy.
- Institution (optional) — matched against a ROR (Research Organization Registry) identifier, used to surface institution-specific transformative agreements.
In practice, the walkthrough looks like this:
- Go to journalcheckertool.org and enter the journal name or ISSN in the search field.
- Select the funder from the dropdown (only cOAlition S member funders are listed).
- Select the institution, or tick “No affiliation” if it does not appear or is not relevant.
- Run the check. The tool returns one of three outcomes for each applicable route: Compliant, Non-Compliant, or Unknown (insufficient data), each with a short audit trail explaining the decision.
- If more than one route is compliant, compare them — self-archiving is usually cost-free, while gold and transformative routes may carry an article processing charge (APC) or be covered by an institutional agreement.
What happens if my funder is not listed in the Journal Checker Tool?
If a funder does not appear in the tool’s dropdown, it is not a cOAlition S member and Plan S compliance rules do not apply to that grant. Authors should confirm current membership on cOAlition S’s published funder list before assuming no obligation exists for that award.
What does a “Rights Retention” result mean?
A Rights Retention result shows the funder has adopted the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy, so every journal has a compliance route: authors can self-archive the accepted manuscript under a CC BY licence, provided the mandated rights-retention statement is included in the submitted paper.
Is the Transformative Journals route still checked by the tool?
The tool’s TJ-Check algorithm still runs internally, but cOAlition S financial support for Transformative Journals ceased on 31 December 2024, following a January 2023 announcement that ended new applications. Authors and institutions should treat any TJ-based compliance result as historical rather than as current funding policy going forward.
Can I check compliance without knowing my institution?
Yes. If an institution is not listed, authors can tick the “No affiliation” checkbox and run the check on funder and journal alone, or search using the organisation’s ROR identifier, which the tool accepts directly in place of a full name match, avoiding acronym confusion.
The Compliance Routes the JCT Checks
The JCT’s back end runs a separate check for each of four defined routes to Plan S compliance. Not every route is available for every journal-funder-institution combination, and one route — Transformative Journals — is now effectively legacy.
| Route | What it means | Current status in the JCT |
|---|---|---|
| Full/Gold Open Access | Journal publishes all content OA immediately under a compliant licence (typically CC BY), often via an APC. | Actively checked; primary route for fully OA journals listed in DOAJ. |
| Self-Archiving (Green) | Author deposits the accepted manuscript in a repository with no embargo, typically supported by the Rights Retention Strategy. | Actively checked; available even when no other route applies, if the funder has adopted Rights Retention. |
| Transformative Agreements (TA) | Institution or consortium holds a “read and publish” deal, registered in the ESAC Registry, that converts subscription spend into OA publishing credits. | Actively checked against the ESAC Registry; agreements are removed three months after they expire unless renewed. |
| Transformative Journals (TJ) | Hybrid/subscription journal previously committed to gradually increasing its OA share under a time-limited scheme. | Algorithm still runs, but cOAlition S financial support and new TJ applications ended 31 December 2024. |
Where more than one route returns “Compliant,” the JCT does not rank them — it presents all valid options and leaves the choice to the author, since cost, speed and institutional agreements will differ.
Where the Tool’s Compliance Data Comes From
The JCT does not hold opinions of its own; it aggregates and caches data from several external, authoritative registries and refreshes them on a schedule:
- DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) — the curated list used to identify fully Open Access journals and their licensing terms.
- Crossref — supplies journal and funder metadata, including the Crossref Funder IDs used to match grants to policies.
- ESAC Registry — the authoritative source for transformative agreements, including their start and expiry dates.
- Journal Comparison Service (JCS) — a lesser-known component through which publishers voluntarily share journal-level price and service data; the list of participating publishers and covered years is published as an open CSV, even though the underlying price data itself sits behind a JCS account.
- Shareyourpaper.org permissions data — informs self-archiving embargo and licence terms for the Green route.
Because compliance results are only as good as the underlying registries, cOAlition S actively asks publishers to keep their DOAJ listings, ESAC agreements and JCS submissions current — an accuracy dependency that is easy to overlook when treating the JCT purely as a black-box checker.
What This Means for Authors, Institutions and Publishers
For authors, the practical takeaway is to run the check before submission, not after acceptance — a journal that looked compliant a year ago may have lost an expired transformative agreement, and a TJ-based result from 2024 no longer reflects live funder policy. The tool’s open, documented API (github.com/CottageLabs/jct) also means library systems, submission platforms and reference managers can embed live compliance checks rather than linking out.
For research administration teams, the JCT’s audit trail is the useful artefact: it gives a defensible, timestamped record of why a route was judged compliant, which is valuable when reporting to funders or resolving a post-publication dispute.
For publishers, the tool is a reminder that Plan S compliance is now infrastructure-dependent: a journal’s real-world eligibility rests on whether its DOAJ entry, ESAC agreement and JCS submission are current, not on the publisher’s own marketing claims of “Plan S compliant” status.
The Outlook: JCT After the Plan S Review
cOAlition S ran a formal review of Plan S’s requirements, effects and impact through 2024, alongside the scheduled wind-down of Transformative Agreement and Transformative Journal financial support at year end. That review is reshaping which routes funders will continue to recognise, and the JCT’s route-by-route architecture means it can retire or add compliance checks — as it did with TJ — without authors needing to learn a new interface. The practical implication is that the Journal Checker Tool, not any single funder policy page, remains the fastest way to get a current answer, and it is worth re-checking a journal even if it was confirmed compliant in a previous grant cycle.
