- What cOAlition S actually announced in November 2025
- Plan S 2018 versus the 2026-2030 strategy: what changed
- What enforcement looks like now
- Common questions about the open access commitment
- Implications for institutional compliance workflows
On 12 November 2025, cOAlition S published a statement titled “cOAlition S reinforces Open Access commitment while advancing next strategic phase.” The framing was affirmative, but the substance was a retreat. The cOAlition S open access commitment for 2026-2030 drops the all-funder compliance mandate that defined Plan S since 2018 in favour of three broader, less prescriptive priorities — and December 2025 trade coverage, including Chemistry World, read the move for what it is: a narrowing of ambition after seven years of uneven enforcement.
For research administrators who built compliance workflows, journal-checker integrations, and funder-reporting templates around the original all-or-nothing mandate, this is not a footnote. It is a structural change in what “Plan S compliant” means going forward.
What cOAlition S actually announced in November 2025
cOAlition S — the international consortium of research funders formed in 2018, coordinated through Science Europe — published its Strategy 2026-2030 alongside the November statement. Mari Sundli Tveit, Chief Executive of the Research Council of Norway and Chair of the cOAlition S Leaders Group, said the coalition remains “determined to accelerate full and immediate Open Access,” while explicitly widening the mission to include transparency, equity, and the trustworthiness of scientific knowledge.
Three strategic priorities now anchor the plan:
- Strengthening the foundations for full, immediate, sustainable, and equitable open access to peer-reviewed scholarly articles.
- Supporting the digital infrastructure that underpins open access publishing.
- Exploring financially sustainable, equitable publishing systems while monitoring their progress and impact.
Notably, the statement does not repeat the 2018 promise of a single, enforced compliance deadline for all member funders. Instead it describes “extensive member consultation” and implementation that will “unfold collaboratively over the following months” — language that signals coordination rather than a mandate with teeth.
Plan S 2018 versus the 2026-2030 strategy: what changed
Plan S launched in September 2018 with twelve founding funders and a hard requirement: from 2021, all peer-reviewed publications resulting from grants awarded by cOAlition S members had to appear in fully open access journals or platforms, or be deposited immediately in a repository without embargo, under a CC BY licence. It was designed as an all-or-nothing mandate — no partial credit, no member opt-outs on the core requirement.
The clearest concrete break in the 2026-2030 strategy is the end of coalition-wide financial support for “transformative arrangements” (read-and-publish and similar hybrid-journal deals), which member funders had already agreed to stop funding after 2024. Those agreements were originally sold as a bridge to full open access; cOAlition S’s own strategy materials now treat their expiry as settled, while the harder question — what replaces them at scale — is deferred to the “exploring financially sustainable, equitable publishing systems” priority rather than answered outright.
| Dimension | Plan S (2018 launch) | cOAlition S Strategy 2026-2030 |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance model | Single mandatory deadline (2021) for all member-funded outputs | Coordinated priorities, member-level implementation timelines |
| Core licence requirement | CC BY, no embargo | Unchanged — still CC BY, no embargo, where applicable |
| Transformative agreements | Tolerated as a temporary bridge | Coalition funding ended after 2024 |
| Scope of mission | Full and immediate open access | Adds transparency, equity, trustworthiness, AI-era research integrity |
| Governance framing | Uniform mandate across members | “Diverse national and international contexts,” unified advocacy rather than enforcement |
What has not changed, per cOAlition S’s own materials: the underlying licensing requirement (CC BY, no embargo) still applies where a member funder’s policy invokes it. What has changed is the coalition-level machinery that once stood behind that requirement as a shared, enforced deadline.
What enforcement looks like now
The 2018 model relied on a shared Journal Checker Tool, coordinated funder policies, and the implicit threat of a synchronised 2021 deadline across all members. The 2026-2030 model relies instead on individual funder policies operating inside a shared strategic direction — each cOAlition S member (among them UKRI, the Wellcome Trust, and the European Commission via Horizon Europe) continues to set and enforce its own grant conditions, but the coalition itself is stepping back from presenting those conditions as a single synchronised mandate.
This is a meaningful distinction for anyone doing compliance work:
- Funder-level open access requirements (UKRI’s policy, Horizon Europe’s Open Research mandate, Wellcome’s policy) remain in force and are not softened by the coalition statement.
- What is softened is the coalition-wide narrative that all of this adds up to one enforced standard with one compliance bar.
- Institutions should expect continued policy divergence between funders rather than the convergence Plan S originally promised.
Common questions about the open access commitment
What is Plan S in open access?
Plan S is the 2018 open access mandate from cOAlition S requiring that peer-reviewed publications funded by member grants be made immediately available, without embargo, under a CC BY licence — either via a compliant open access venue or an institutional repository.
Has cOAlition S dropped its open access mandate?
No — cOAlition S has not dropped the underlying licensing requirement. What changed is the coalition-level enforcement model: the Strategy 2026-2030 replaces a single all-funder compliance deadline with three broader strategic priorities and funder-level implementation.
Who are the cOAlition S funders?
cOAlition S launched in 2018 with twelve national and international research funders and has since grown; current members include research councils and funding bodies coordinated through Science Europe, alongside participants such as the European Commission via Horizon Europe. Membership composition is published on coalition-s.org.
Are transformative agreements still funded under Plan S?
No. cOAlition S member funders confirmed the end of financial support for transformative arrangements such as read-and-publish deals after 2024, treating them as an expired transitional measure rather than a permanent open access route.
Implications for institutional compliance workflows
Institutions that built compliance infrastructure — journal-checker integrations, repository deposit workflows, funder-reporting dashboards — around the assumption of one synchronised cOAlition S standard now need to re-map that infrastructure to individual funder policies. The practical risk is not that requirements have loosened; UKRI, Wellcome, and Horizon Europe policies are each still active and still require licence and embargo compliance on their own terms. The risk is assuming coalition-level messaging still functions as a single compliance proxy for all of them.
Research offices should treat the 2026-2030 strategy as a signal to audit funder policies individually rather than defer to a “Plan S compliant” shorthand that no longer maps cleanly onto one enforced standard. That audit work sits alongside related contributor-transparency and authorship-attribution practices that institutions are already tracking — for example through the CRediT contributor role taxonomy, which CASRAI originated in 2014 and which is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and through broader research administration compliance frameworks.
The next twelve months matter. cOAlition S has said implementation of the new strategy will “unfold collaboratively” — which means the concrete compliance detail research offices actually need (updated guidance, any revised Journal Checker Tool logic, member-by-member timelines) is still being written. Institutions that wait for a single unified answer, as they could under the 2018 framing, are likely to be waiting through most of 2026. The more defensible posture is to track each funder’s policy directly and treat the coalition strategy as directional context rather than an enforceable standard in its own right.
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