CASRAI Dictionary

Author: MCP Service

  • ORI Research Misconduct Policy: 2026 Annual Assurance Renewal Explained

    The ORI research misconduct policy that governs Public Health Service (PHS)-funded research changed materially for 2026, and the annual paperwork cycle that keeps an institution’s assurance active has not paused to accommodate the transition. Every institution that holds a PHS assurance under 42 CFR Part 93 — whether or not it has an open case — must file its Annual Report on Possible Research Misconduct between 1 January and 30 April 2026, and for the first time that filing sits alongside a revised regulatory framework institutions are expected to have already adopted.

    This is a mechanics piece, not a restatement of the Final Rule’s substance. It sets out exactly what the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity (ORI) expects institutions to submit for the 2026 assurance renewal cycle, which form to use, and where the transition from the 2005 regulation creates procedural traps for research integrity officers (RIOs) and sponsored-programs staff.

    What changed: the Final Rule and the 2026 effective date

    ORI’s revised Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct — published in the Federal Register on 17 September 2024 and codified at 42 CFR Part 93 — took effect on 1 January 2026. It is the first substantive rewrite of the misconduct regulation since 2005, and it introduces more than twenty-five newly defined terms, including “institutional record,” “administrative record,” “intentionally,” and “recklessly,” aimed at tightening consistency across institutional proceedings.

    The core three-part definition of research misconduct is unchanged: fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism (FFP) that represents a significant departure from accepted practices of the relevant research community, committed intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly, and proven by a preponderance of the evidence. What has changed is procedural detail — respondent comment rights on draft investigation reports, record-retention protocols, and interim-action notification triggers are now spelled out in greater depth.

    Critically, the Final Rule is not retroactive. Allegations received before 1 January 2026 continue to be handled under the 2005 version of Part 93 unless the institution and the respondent agree in writing to proceed under the new rule. Institutions running dual-track proceedings across the transition need to document, case by case, which regulatory version applies.

    Who must file an assurance renewal, and via which form

    Any institution that receives PHS-supported research funds — including awards from NIH, CDC, FDA, HRSA, and other PHS agencies — must maintain an active research misconduct assurance with ORI. Once an assurance is established, the institution is obligated to file annually, regardless of whether it received any misconduct allegations that year.

    • Form: Annual Report on Possible Research Misconduct, Form PHS-6349, submitted through ORI’s online Annual Report system (ARPRM).
    • Filing window: 1 January through 30 April each calendar year, covering the prior calendar year’s activity.
    • 2026 deadline: 30 April 2026, covering the reporting period 1 January–31 December 2025.
    • No-activity institutions: institutions with no PHS-supported research or no allegations in the reporting period may still owe a report; small or inactive institutions should confirm with ORI’s Assurance Program whether a Small Institution or no-activity statement applies to their circumstances.
    • Access: ORI’s Annual Report system now requires two-factor authentication (2FA) — institutions should confirm their registered email with the Assurance Program ([email protected]) well before the deadline to avoid last-minute access issues.

    The 2026 assurance renewal checklist

    Beyond the Form PHS-6349 filing itself, 2026 is unusual because institutions are also expected to have brought their internal policies and procedures into alignment with the new 42 CFR Part 93 requirements. ORI published a Sample Policies and Procedures document in June 2025 specifically to help research integrity officers, compliance staff, and institutional counsel update their templates ahead of the 1 January 2026 effective date.

    Item 2005 rule (pre-2026 cases) 2026 Final Rule
    Effective date 16 June 2005 1 January 2026
    Defined terms in 42 CFR Part 93 Baseline set 25+ additional defined terms
    Applies to allegations received Before 1 Jan 2026 (default) From 1 Jan 2026 onward, or earlier by written agreement
    Annual Report on Possible Research Misconduct Form PHS-6349, Jan–Apr window Unchanged: Form PHS-6349, Jan–Apr window
    Institutional policy alignment N/A Sample Policies and Procedures released June 2025

    Institutions preparing their 2026 renewal should treat the filing as a two-part exercise: (1) submit Form PHS-6349 through ARPRM by 30 April 2026 for the 2025 reporting year, and (2) confirm that the policies and procedures referenced in that assurance actually reflect the post-1-January-2026 regulatory text, not the 2005 language many institutional websites still carry. ORI’s own research administration compliance guidance and case-summary archive remain useful references for RIOs benchmarking their inquiry and investigation timelines against the 60-day inquiry and 120-day investigation targets that persist in the revised rule.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is the deadline for the ORI 2026 annual assurance renewal?

    Institutions holding a PHS research misconduct assurance must file the Annual Report on Possible Research Misconduct (Form PHS-6349) between 1 January and 30 April 2026, covering research misconduct activity from the 2025 calendar year, via ORI’s online ARPRM system.

    Which institutions must maintain an ORI research misconduct assurance?

    Any institution receiving Public Health Service-supported research funds — from NIH, CDC, FDA, or other PHS agencies — must hold an active assurance under 42 CFR Part 93 and file annually, even in years with no reported allegations.

    Does the new ORI Final Rule apply retroactively to open cases?

    No. Allegations received before 1 January 2026 are handled under the 2005 version of 42 CFR Part 93 by default, unless the institution and respondent agree in writing to proceed under the revised rule instead.

    What form and system do institutions use to submit their annual report?

    Institutions submit Form PHS-6349 through ORI’s Annual Report on Possible Research Misconduct system (ARPRM), which now requires two-factor authentication tied to the institution’s registered email address.

    Implications for research administrators

    The overlap between the Final Rule’s 1 January 2026 effective date and the routine 30 April annual report deadline compresses an already tight compliance calendar. Research integrity officers now need to reconcile three separate obligations in the same window: filing the standard annual report, confirming that institutional policies match the revised regulatory text, and correctly classifying any pending allegation as either a 2005-rule case or a 2026-rule case for procedural purposes.

    ORI’s most recent published Annual Report, covering 2024 activity, recorded 713 allegations of possible research misconduct and 117 new cases opened that year, with 38 cases carried over from prior years — a caseload that gives some sense of scale for institutions weighing how much internal capacity to dedicate to inquiry and investigation infrastructure under the tightened procedural clock.

    • Audit institutional policy language against ORI’s June 2025 Sample Policies and Procedures document before certifying compliance in the 2026 assurance filing.
    • Tag open cases by intake date to determine which regulatory version (2005 or 2026) governs each proceeding.
    • Confirm ARPRM account access and two-factor authentication setup well ahead of the 30 April deadline — do not wait for filing week.
    • Brief institutional review boards and legal counsel on the expanded defined terms, particularly “recklessly” and “intentionally,” which affect how misconduct findings are documented.

    Looking ahead

    The 2026 cycle is likely to be the messiest transition year institutions face under 42 CFR Part 93 for some time: two regulatory regimes running in parallel, a compressed policy-update timeline, and an unchanged annual filing deadline that does not care which rule applies to a given case. Institutions that treat the 30 April 2026 Form PHS-6349 submission purely as a data return — rather than as an opportunity to verify their underlying policies actually match the current regulation — risk finding gaps only when ORI reviews a proceeding. Research administrators tracking related standards work, including contributor-role and authorship frameworks referenced in misconduct findings, can cross-reference CASRAI’s CRediT contributor role and authorship resources when documenting responsibility in a research record.

  • Research Misconduct and the Guarantor Author: Why Corresponding Authors Carry More Risk

    The Office of Research Integrity research misconduct process — and its UK counterpart, the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) — was not designed around a single author byline. It was designed around named investigators who can be held individually accountable. That is precisely why the guarantor and corresponding author roles matter so much more than most authorship guidance admits. When an allegation of fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism (FFP) lands on an institution’s desk, it does not spread evenly across the byline. It lands hardest on whoever agreed to answer for the work as a whole.

    Coverage of author-contribution statements — CRediT tags, ICMJE criteria, “who did what” disclosures — tends to treat authorship as a credit-allocation problem. This piece takes a narrower, more consequential angle: the guarantor and corresponding author roles are accountability-allocation mechanisms, and they carry meaningfully different legal and institutional exposure than ordinary co-authorship.

    Guarantor vs corresponding author: two roles, often confused

    The two roles are frequently collapsed into one person, but they are not the same function.

    • Corresponding author — per ICMJE, “the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer-review, and publication process,” including ethics approvals, disclosures, and post-publication queries.
    • Guarantor — a role some journals (notably BMJ and Cell Press titles) formalise separately, describing the guarantor as the person who “takes responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article.”

    Cell Press editors proposed uncoupling the two designations explicitly, noting that as author lists grow — averaging roughly 5.25 authors per paper by 2012, nearly double the 1980 figure — no single contributor can plausibly vouch for every dataset. A named guarantor, distinct from whoever merely handles journal correspondence, was their proposed fix. Many journals still have not adopted the split, which is exactly why disputes over “who was actually accountable” recur when misconduct is alleged.

    Why the distinction matters once misconduct is alleged

    ICMJE’s fourth authorship criterion requires “agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.” Every listed author technically signs up to this. In practice, investigators treat it unevenly.

    In the United States, the HHS Office of Research Integrity defines research misconduct under 42 CFR Part 93 as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting results — explicitly excluding honest error and genuine differences of opinion. ORI does not conduct most investigations itself; federally funded institutions do, under their own procedures, with ORI providing oversight and the power to impose findings such as debarment from federal funding.

    Three factors sharpen exposure for guarantors and corresponding authors specifically:

    1. Presumed oversight duty. A corresponding or guarantor author who failed to verify underlying data can be found to have acted recklessly, even absent direct knowledge of fabrication — a lower bar than intentional deception.
    2. Grant and funder exposure. Where federally or publicly funded research is involved, false statements in grant applications or resulting publications can trigger civil liability distinct from the institutional misconduct finding itself.
    3. Correction and retraction duties fall to them. Journals route retraction and correction processes through the corresponding author, making that person the operational face of any remediation — regardless of who actually generated the disputed data.

    Answer-first: the questions researchers actually ask

    What is the difference between a guarantor and a corresponding author?

    The guarantor takes responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to publication, including verifying that the data are sound. The corresponding author is the primary contact point for the journal during submission, peer review and after publication. Some journals require these to be the same person; others, including BMJ, allow separate designations.

    What are the responsibilities of a corresponding author?

    A corresponding author ensures ethics approvals, disclosures and authorship details are correctly reported to the journal, remains available to respond to editorial queries during review, and stays reachable after publication to address data requests or critiques. ICMJE recommends journals still copy all listed authors on correspondence, not only this individual.

    Is corresponding author a big deal?

    Yes — despite sometimes being treated as a routine administrative label, it carries real accountability weight. The corresponding author is not automatically the most senior researcher, but investigators, journals and funders typically direct misconduct queries, correction requests and retraction proceedings to this person first, well before other co-authors are contacted.

    How ORI and UKRIO assess culpability differently

    The US and UK systems share the same core definition of misconduct (fabrication, falsification, plagiarism) but differ sharply in enforcement architecture — a distinction rarely made explicit in guidance aimed at authors.

    Feature United States (ORI / HHS) United Kingdom (UKRIO / UKCORI)
    Statutory basis 42 CFR Part 93 (federal regulation) No single statutory body; sector-agreed Concordat to Support Research Integrity
    Who investigates The funded institution, with ORI oversight of PHS-funded research The employing institution, with UKRIO offering advisory support on request
    Sanction power ORI can debar individuals from federal funding No central debarment power; sanctions are institutional (dismissal, retraction referral)
    Public reporting ORI publishes case summaries and administrative actions UKCORI publishes an annual sector-wide statement, not individual case findings
    Author-role focus Investigations increasingly examine individual contribution and supervisory role Institutional codes (e.g., UKRIO’s Code of Practice for Research) stress joint and individual responsibility

    Neither system has a formal legal category called “guarantor.” Both, however, are moving toward differentiated rather than collective culpability — meaning the person who signed as corresponding author or accepted the guarantor role is increasingly the first, not the last, name investigators examine.

    Implications for institutions, journals and PIs

    For research administrators and institutional leaders, three practical consequences follow:

    • Authorship agreements signed before submission should record, in writing, who is guarantor and who is corresponding author — they need not be the same person.
    • Data-verification procedures should be documented contemporaneously, since “did the guarantor take reasonable steps to verify the data” is now a live question in culpability assessments, not an afterthought.
    • Early-career researchers pressured into corresponding-author roles as a “credit” gesture should understand the accountability that travels with the title, not just the citation visibility.

    None of this replaces institutional legal advice once an allegation is formally lodged — but it does mean the accountability conversation should happen at submission, not after a correction letter arrives.

    Where contribution taxonomies fit — and where they don’t

    It is tempting to assume that a granular contribution taxonomy resolves the guarantor question. It does not, by design. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, and the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. CRediT records what each contributor did — conceptualisation, data curation, formal analysis, and so on — but it deliberately does not assign overall accountability for the integrity of the finished article. That is a separate governance question, answered by journal policy and institutional procedure, not by the taxonomy.

    Understanding the distinct CRediT contributor roles alongside the broader authorship criteria frameworks helps research offices see the gap clearly: a taxonomy can show who curated the data, but only a named guarantor or corresponding author can be held to account for whether that data was verified before publication. Research administration teams building institutional policy around the CRediT taxonomy should treat guarantor designation as a distinct, additional step — not something the taxonomy already covers.

    As funders and journals continue tightening data-verification and retraction workflows, the guarantor and corresponding author roles are likely to become more formally defined, not less. Institutions that document these roles clearly at submission — rather than defaulting to “whoever emailed the journal” — will be better placed when an allegation, however rare, actually arrives.

  • Retraction Watch Database Free: How to Use It for Institutional Due Diligence

    When a hiring committee, grant panel, or co-author vetting workflow needs to check a candidate’s publication record, the Retraction Watch Database is usually the first stop. Accessing the retraction watch database free of charge is now straightforward, but only if research offices know which of its three access routes to use — and where its coverage runs thin. This guide sets out a practical, step-by-step approach for institutional due diligence, plus the credibility caveats a screening checklist should not skip.

    What is the Retraction Watch database?

    The Retraction Watch Database (RWDB) is maintained by the Center for Scientific Integrity, the nonprofit behind the Retraction Watch blog founded in 2010 by science journalists Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus. It now logs more than 65,000 retractions, corrections, and expressions of concern, up from roughly 40,000 entries at the time of its September 2023 data-sharing agreement with Crossref, which made the dataset far more widely and openly accessible.

    Retraction Watch also publishes derivative lists that get searched separately: the Retraction Watch Leaderboard (most-retracted individual authors) and country-level breakdowns used in bibliometric research. These are useful signals, but they are not substitutes for a record-level check, as the sections below explain.

    How to search the Retraction Watch database for free

    There are three free access routes, and each suits a different due-diligence task.

    Access method Best for Coverage / updates Cost and limits
    Web search form (retractiondatabase.org) Quick, single-name or single-DOI checks Live; each search returns up to 50 entries Free; since October 2024 you must fill at least one of article type, a date range, or a PMID/DOI
    Full CSV download (Crossref GitLab repository) Bulk screening of long candidate or co-investigator lists Complete dataset, refreshed periodically Free; no per-query limits
    Crossref REST API Automated checks embedded in onboarding or grant systems Updated on working days from publisher data Free; standard Crossref API rate limits apply

    For a single name or one paper’s DOI, the web form is fastest. For anything resembling a batch check — a full hiring shortlist, an entire grant consortium, or an author list on a multi-author manuscript — the CSV download or the API is the correct tool, because the web interface’s per-search filter requirement makes open-ended browsing impractical by design.

    Using the database for hiring, grant, and co-author due diligence

    Research offices increasingly build RWDB checks into standard screening, alongside conflict-of-interest disclosures and authorship verification. A workable process looks like this:

    • Before a hiring or tenure decision, batch-check the candidate’s DOI or PMID list against the CSV download rather than the web form, which is not built for unfiltered browsing.
    • For grant panels, check every named co-investigator’s publication list, not only the principal investigator’s — retraction risk is frequently concentrated in co-authored papers rather than sole-authored ones.
    • For co-author vetting ahead of a manuscript submission, search prospective collaborators by name and affiliation, and treat a “Correction” or “Expression of Concern” entry as a prompt for further reading, not an automatic disqualifier.
    • Record the query date and parameters used: RWDB entries are added and revised continuously, so a clean result today is not a permanent clearance.
    • Cross-reference any hit against PubMed and the publisher’s own notice before acting on it, given documented metadata discrepancies between databases.

    Common questions, answered

    Is there a Retraction Watch database?

    Yes. The Retraction Watch Database is maintained by the Center for Scientific Integrity and hosted at retractiondatabase.org. It logs more than 65,000 retractions, corrections, and expressions of concern, and since September 2023 has been distributed publicly through a data agreement with Crossref.

    Use the free web form at retractiondatabase.org, filtering by article type, date range, or a PMID/DOI — required since October 2024 to manage server load. For bulk or unrestricted searching, download the complete dataset as a free CSV from Crossref’s GitLab repository instead.

    How do I check if a specific article has been retracted?

    Search the article’s DOI or PMID directly in the RWDB, or check the publisher’s own page for a retraction notice. Tools such as Zotero and the Crossref REST API also flag retracted status automatically when a DOI is queried or a reference is added to a library.

    Is Retraction Watch data comprehensive for corrections and expressions of concern?

    No. Retraction Watch states its database is the most complete source specifically for retractions; coverage of corrections and expressions of concern is skewed toward items linked to existing retractions or its own reporting, so due-diligence teams should treat those two categories as indicative rather than exhaustive.

    Limits, credibility, and what the leaderboard does (and doesn’t) tell you

    The RWDB’s own user guide is explicit about its boundaries: expressions of concern and corrections are entered “as they relate to existing retractions, blog posts, or high-profile studies,” not comprehensively, so any counts of those two record types drawn from the database will be skewed and should not be read as population-representative.

    Is Retraction Watch credible for institutional due diligence? The evidence points to yes, with caveats. The Center for Scientific Integrity’s dataset has been independently examined in the academic literature — a 2025 study in Accountability in Research compared RWD metadata accuracy against PubMed and Web of Science and found it a strong, though not flawless, source. Its integration into Crossref’s scholarly infrastructure since 2023 adds a layer of institutional stewardship beyond a single newsroom, and reference tools such as Zotero rely on it to flag retracted citations automatically.

    The Retraction Watch Leaderboard — a running list of the most-retracted individual researchers, topped for years by anaesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii with more than 180 retractions — and country-level breakdowns used in bibliometric studies are genuinely useful for spotting patterns. But leaderboard rank reflects investigative attention and reporting history as much as underlying prevalence, and cross-country comparisons need population and output normalisation that the raw retraction watch by country counts do not themselves provide. Neither should replace a DOI-level check on the specific individual or paper under review.

    Implications for research offices

    The database’s growth — from roughly 40,000 entries at the time of the Crossref agreement to more than 65,000 now — reflects both rising retraction volume and improved detection, not necessarily declining research quality alone. For research administration teams, the practical implication is to treat RWDB screening as a routine, documented step in research administration workflows, sitting alongside authorship and contributorship checks rather than as an ad hoc search performed only when a concern is already raised.

    As programmatic access matures through the Crossref API, expect RWDB checks to become embedded directly into hiring, grants, and manuscript systems, much as authorship verification already is. Institutions that build this into a documented, repeatable checklist — rather than a one-off Google search — will be better placed to defend their due-diligence decisions if a retraction surfaces after the fact.

  • Research Misconduct Penalties: Vietnam’s New Tiered System

    Vietnam has become the latest country to formalise research misconduct penalties into a graduated, rules-based system. A 25 May 2026 directive from the Ministry of Science and Technology, first reported by Retraction Watch, moves the country from voluntary integrity principles toward enforceable sanctions — written warnings, public apologies, funding claw-backs and indefinite bans — scaled to the severity of the offence. For institutions and funders elsewhere weighing graduated sanctions frameworks, Vietnam’s approach is a live case study in proportionate enforcement.

    Vietnam’s new framework: what the Ministry announced

    The guidance requires every science and technology organisation in Vietnam to adopt formal rules against research misconduct and to follow a defined process for investigating and sanctioning violations. Before the directive, integrity expectations existed mainly as general principles encouraged on a voluntary basis, without a consistent enforcement mechanism across institutions.

    The framework names four categories as the most serious violations:

    • Fabricating data
    • Plagiarising others’ work
    • Concealing conflicts of interest
    • Acts that distort the true nature of the research

    Notably, the guidance also addresses generative-AI misuse directly — creating fake data or images, or citing unverified AI-generated material as a reference are both classed as violations. Researchers are additionally required to run plagiarism checks before submission, retain raw data and research logs, and disclose funding sources, conflicts of interest and any AI use. Confirmed violations must be logged on Vietnam’s National Digital Platform for Science, Technology and Innovation Management, giving the sanctions a permanent, searchable public record.

    A tiered system: how the penalties scale with severity

    Rather than a single blanket punishment, the framework sets out a ladder of responses, so that a first, low-level infraction is treated differently from deliberate fabrication. This proportionality principle is common to most mature integrity systems, but Vietnam’s version is unusually explicit about which penalty attaches to which tier.

    Severity tier Example conduct Typical sanction
    Lower tier Procedural lapses, inadequate disclosure Written warning, mandatory training
    Mid tier Undisclosed conflicts of interest, authorship disputes Correction/retraction request, public apology, role suspension
    Upper tier Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, concealed AI misuse Return of research funding, permanent or indefinite project ban

    The Ministry’s move follows years of pressure from documented cases. Retraction Watch’s database records 251 retractions carrying a Vietnamese institutional affiliation, with Ton Duc Thang University and Duy Tan University accounting for the largest share. Investigative reporting by the newspaper Thanh Nien in 2020 found foreign academics were being paid to falsely list affiliations with Vietnamese universities to inflate publication counts and rankings — at one point roughly 70% of Ton Duc Thang’s 2022 publications involved external, unaffiliated researchers. A separate 2022 investigation into a large Russian paper mill placed Vietnamese researchers among its top ten purchasers of fabricated authorship slots.

    Tu Van Duong, a senior researcher at Purdue University, described the directive as an “important milestone,” noting that Vietnam’s integrity expectations had previously relied on general principles and voluntary encouragement rather than binding enforcement.

    Common questions on research misconduct penalties

    What are the penalties for research misconduct?

    Penalties typically form a graduated scale: written warnings and retraining for minor lapses, followed by correction or retraction of publications, mandatory supervision, and — for the most serious cases — loss of employment, revoked degrees, permanent funding bans, and in rare cases criminal prosecution for misuse of public funds.

    What are the three types of research misconduct?

    Most frameworks, including the US federal definition and Vietnam’s new guidance, converge on three core categories: fabrication (inventing data or results), falsification (manipulating data, equipment, or processes to misrepresent findings), and plagiarism (using others’ ideas or words without credit).

    What happens if you get caught for academic misconduct?

    An institutional panel investigates the allegation, typically involving academic peers and external members. If misconduct is confirmed, consequences range from a formal reprimand or required correction through to suspension, termination, degree revocation, and referral to funders or professional bodies for further sanction.

    Who investigates allegations of research misconduct?

    Primary responsibility usually sits with the researcher’s own institution, guided by a code of practice such as the UK’s Concordat to Support Research Integrity. National bodies — Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology, the US Office of Research Integrity, Germany’s DFG — provide oversight, funding sanctions, or an appellate role rather than running every case.

    How Vietnam compares: graduated sanctions worldwide

    Vietnam is not acting in isolation. Several jurisdictions have tightened or formalised research misconduct policy in the same window, reflecting a broader shift toward proportionate, publicly verifiable enforcement.

    Jurisdiction / body Mechanism Notable feature
    United States (ORI, NSF) Debarment from federal funding Confirmed cases published publicly
    United Kingdom (UKRI) Funding withdrawal, application bar Institutions face sanction if investigations are inadequate
    Germany (DFG) Exclusion from applying for funds 1–8 year bans, published sanctions list
    Canada (Tri-Agency) Reprimand to lifetime funding ban Comparatively low public transparency
    Scotland (May 2026) New institutional integrity system requirements Sector-wide baseline standard
    Peru (March 2026) Faculty bonus eligibility rules Bars bonuses for researchers with retractions
    India Grant-application disclosure requirement Five-year retraction history must be declared
    Thailand (THRIN) National research integrity network Cross-institutional coordination body
    Vietnam (May 2026) Tiered warnings to indefinite bans Violations logged on a national digital platform

    The common thread is a move away from vague, principle-only guidance toward codified, tiered sanctions with a public or semi-public record — precisely the design pattern uk research misconduct bodies such as UKRIO have long recommended through the Concordat to Support Research Integrity, and that international bodies including the European Network of Research Integrity Offices (ENRIO) are working to harmonise across borders.

    Implications for institutions and research administrators

    For research administrators, Vietnam’s framework is a useful reference point when reviewing a local research misconduct policy. Three implications stand out:

    • Proportionality reduces case backlog. A defined tier structure lets institutions resolve low-severity cases with training or a warning, reserving lengthy formal investigations for fabrication, falsification and plagiarism.
    • Public logging changes deterrence dynamics. A searchable national record — as opposed to institution-only files — raises the reputational stakes of a confirmed finding, mirroring the public debarment lists already run by the US Office of Research Integrity and Germany’s DFG.
    • AI-specific clauses are becoming standard. Explicitly naming fabricated AI outputs and unverified AI citations as misconduct closes a gap that many older policies, including some still in force across UK and EU institutions, have not yet updated to cover.

    Misattributed or inflated authorship — the practice exposed at Ton Duc Thang and Duy Tan — is itself a form of research misconduct, and one that transparent contributorship reporting can help deter. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014 to make individual research contributions auditable; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Institutions building or revising misconduct policy alongside authorship criteria and contributor role disclosure requirements give investigators a clearer evidentiary trail when authorship claims are disputed. For teams mapping their own procedures against comparable frameworks, CASRAI’s research administration resources and research integrity terminology reference are a starting point.

    What comes next

    Vietnam’s National Digital Platform will take time to populate, and enforcement consistency across thousands of institutions and provincial science agencies remains untested. The real signal will be whether confirmed cases are actually logged, sanctioned and made visible — the same accountability gap that has historically limited Canada’s Tri-Agency framework and left some European systems reliant on anonymised summaries rather than named findings.

    What is clear is the direction of travel. Alongside Scotland’s new institutional requirements, Peru’s bonus restrictions, and India’s disclosure rules, Vietnam’s tiered penalties add to a growing body of 2026 evidence that funders and governments are converging on graduated, publicly verifiable sanctions rather than one-size-fits-all punishment. For institutions still relying on ad hoc disciplinary procedures, that convergence is now the benchmark to measure against.

  • Scotland’s New Research Integrity Policy: What UK Institutions Must Do Before September 2026

    The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) approved a new research integrity policy in May 2026, and it takes effect on 1 September 2026 for every Scottish higher education institution that receives SFC research and innovation funding. The policy is not a rewrite of institutional codes of conduct — those remain the responsibility of individual universities — but it introduces a mandatory reporting relationship between institutions and their funder that did not previously exist in Scotland, and it gives research offices a firm compliance deadline to work against.

    For pre-award, governance and research integrity teams, the practical question is not whether the policy is welcome — it broadly restates principles already embedded in the UK-wide Concordat to Support Research Integrity — but what operational changes are needed before the start date, and how Scotland’s approach compares with the mechanisms already in place across the rest of the UK.

    What the Scottish Funding Council’s new policy requires

    The SFC policy defines research integrity in terms consistent with UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) own framing: research that is trustworthy, ethical and responsible, guided by five principles — honesty, rigour, transparency and open communication, care and respect, and accountability. Those five principles mirror the commitments set out in the revised Concordat to Support Research Integrity, so institutions already aligned with the Concordat are not starting from zero.

    The operative change is procedural. Under the new policy, institutions receiving SFC research and innovation funding must notify the Council of the outcome of any formal investigation into research misconduct, with a benchmark turnaround of no more than one month following the investigation’s conclusion. This is a step beyond the general expectation, long established through the Concordat, that funded organisations simply maintain “appropriate structures, policies and procedures” to support integrity — it creates a specific, time-bound reporting obligation tied to SFC funding.

    Three scope points matter for compliance planning:

    • The policy applies to Scottish higher education institutions that receive SFC research and innovation funding, and to research activity the Council funds directly.
    • The SFC will not act as an appeals body for individual misconduct cases, will not support individuals through investigations, and will not grant ethical clearance for research projects — those functions stay with the institution and, where applicable, research ethics committees.
    • The Council reserves the right to act where misconduct is reported, which may include action relating to individuals or a review of an institution’s own processes and systems — a lever that raises the stakes of a weak or slow internal investigation process.

    How it fits the UK-wide Concordat to Support Research Integrity

    The Scottish policy is explicitly framed as complementary to, not a replacement for, the Concordat to Support Research Integrity — the UK-wide framework signed by universities, funders and sector bodies and refreshed in April 2025. The revised Concordat broadened its recognition of contributors to research beyond principal investigators to include research-enabling staff such as technicians, data managers and research development professionals, and it updated its language on questionable research practices.

    The UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) updated its own UKRIO Code of Practice for Research to Version 3.5 in July 2025 specifically to align with the revised Concordat, adding new guidance on the responsible use of AI and other emerging technologies in research, and deliberately softening language around misconduct procedures to reduce the stigma that UKRIO’s own 2024 research found was discouraging staff from reporting concerns. Scotland’s new policy sits on top of this existing architecture: it does not change what “good research conduct” means, but it changes who has to be told when conduct falls short, and how quickly.

    Scotland versus the rest of the UK: a comparison

    No other UK funding council currently mandates misconduct-outcome reporting on the same timetable as the SFC. The table below sets out how the main frameworks compare for a Scottish, UK-wide and cross-border institution.

    Framework Scope Misconduct reporting to funder Status from September 2026
    SFC Research Integrity Policy Scottish HEIs receiving SFC research/innovation funding Mandatory outcome notification, benchmark of one month post-conclusion Mandatory, funding-linked
    Concordat to Support Research Integrity (2025) UK-wide, all signatory institutions and funders General expectation of appropriate structures and annual statements; no fixed reporting clock Voluntary sector commitment
    UKRI Guidance on Investigation of Research Misconduct Organisations holding UKRI grants, UK-wide Requires investigation of allegations against funded staff/students; reporting terms set out in grant conditions Grant-condition based
    UKRIO Code of Practice for Research (v3.5) Any UK or international research organisation, adoptable in full or in part No reporting mandate; benchmark and advisory framework only Voluntary adoption

    The practical effect for cross-border institutions — a Scottish university with UKRI grants, for example, or a UK-wide research group with a Scottish node — is that the SFC clock now runs in parallel with, not instead of, existing UKRI grant conditions and Concordat commitments. Research offices need a single misconduct-tracking process that can satisfy the tightest of the applicable deadlines, rather than separate parallel logs.

    What pre-award and research offices must change before September 2026

    With roughly two months between SFC approval and the effective date, research integrity and governance teams have a narrow window to close gaps. The priority actions are:

    • Map the reporting chain. Confirm who in the institution is authorised to notify the SFC of an investigation outcome, and build the one-month clock into the misconduct investigation procedure itself, not as an afterthought once a case closes.
    • Audit investigation timelines. If current misconduct procedures routinely run beyond a month from conclusion to formal sign-off, the reporting deadline effectively compresses the institution’s own internal process.
    • Update the annual statement on research integrity. Institutions already produce a Concordat-aligned annual statement; this is the natural place to reference the new SFC notification duty and evidence compliance.
    • Brief research ethics committees and REI managers. The SFC has been explicit that it will not adjudicate individual cases or grant ethical approval, so institutions cannot rely on the Council to absorb any of that governance load.
    • Cross-check against UKRI and other funder conditions. Where a case involves UKRI or other funding alongside SFC money, confirm which reporting obligation applies first and ensure both are met.

    Questions institutions are asking

    What is a research integrity policy?

    A research integrity policy is an institutional or funder document setting out the standards of honesty, rigour, transparency, care and accountability expected in research, alongside the roles, training and procedures — including misconduct investigation — that put those standards into practice across the research lifecycle.

    What is the Concordat to Support Research Integrity?

    The Concordat to Support Research Integrity is a UK-wide sector agreement, signed by universities, funders and representative bodies, committing signatories to five shared responsibilities for maintaining rigour, transparency and accountability in research, most recently revised in April 2025.

    Who investigates research misconduct in the UK?

    Individual institutions investigate research misconduct allegations under their own procedures, informed by the UKRIO Code of Practice for Research; funders such as UKRI and, from September 2026, the SFC in Scotland, set reporting conditions but do not conduct the investigations themselves.

    What happens if an institution breaches its research integrity policy?

    Consequences depend on the framework: internally, breaches can trigger disciplinary action up to dismissal; externally, funders including the SFC can review an institution’s processes and systems, and in serious cases reconsider its funding relationship, though the SFC has stated it will not act as an appeals body.

    Implications beyond Scotland

    Scotland’s move is likely to be watched closely by the other UK nations’ funding bodies as a test case for whether time-bound, funder-mandated misconduct reporting improves transparency without overwhelming research offices. For institutions operating research programmes across borders — a common pattern for Russell Group and consortium-led projects — the immediate implication is administrative: misconduct-case tracking systems built around a single national timetable now need to accommodate a jurisdiction-specific clock for any Scottish-funded strand of work.

    There is also a signalling effect for research culture more broadly. Mandatory outcome reporting, even where the funder is explicit that it will not re-adjudicate cases, tends to raise the internal profile of misconduct procedures and can influence how quickly institutions resource investigation teams. Given UKRIO’s own 2024 finding that fear of stigma was a barrier to reporting concerns, institutions would do well to pair procedural compliance with the destigmatising language changes UKRIO built into Version 3.5 of its Code, rather than treating the SFC deadline as a purely administrative exercise.

    What to watch next

    Three things are worth tracking as the September 2026 start date approaches: whether the SFC publishes supporting guidance or a template notification form ahead of the deadline; whether other UK funders signal an intention to introduce comparable time-bound reporting; and how the first wave of notified outcomes, likely to surface in aggregate through SFC or Universities Scotland reporting during 2027, shapes the sector’s view of whether mandatory reporting changes behaviour or simply changes paperwork. Research offices that treat the current window as a chance to audit and tighten investigation timelines — rather than a compliance box to tick in August — will be best placed regardless of how the policy evolves.

  • Is Plan S Open Access Working? A Sceptic’s Case for Differentiated Mandates

    Five years on from its 1 January 2021 compliance deadline, Plan S open access policy sits in an odd position: widely credited with putting open access on every funder’s agenda, yet quietly walked back by the very coalition that wrote it. An independent October 2024 review, Galvanising the Open Access Community: A Study on the Impact of Plan S, found the policy had a “game-changing” effect through its Rights Retention Strategy. But cOAlition S’s own 2026–2030 strategic plan tells a second story — one of phased retreat from the rigid, one-size-fits-all mandate it launched in 2018. That gap between celebratory retrospective and quiet course-correction is the real story, and it is worth asking plainly whether a blanket mandate was ever the right instrument.

    What Plan S Actually Requires

    Plan S was launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, an international consortium of national research funders and charitable foundations that includes UKRI and the Wellcome Trust. Its ten founding principles required that, from 2021, all peer-reviewed publications resulting from funding by coalition members be made immediately open access — either in a fully open access journal or platform, or via deposit in an open repository with no embargo.

    Two mechanisms did the heavy lifting:

    • The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), which lets funded authors apply a CC BY licence to their author-accepted manuscript regardless of the publisher’s own policy, enabling immediate green open access.
    • Article processing charges (APCs), the fee-based gold open access route, which cOAlition S initially agreed to fund on authors’ behalf where a compliant venue existed.

    Notably, the original ten principles were scoped to peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings. cOAlition S explicitly deferred a firm mandate for monographs and book chapters, citing the different funding cycles, peer-review norms, and licensing conventions of humanities and social-science (HSS) publishing — an early acknowledgement that a single rulebook does not fit every discipline.

    The Case Against the Blanket Mandate

    The criticisms of Plan S are not new, but they have hardened rather than faded. Three stand out.

    Cost-shifting to APCs. By pushing gold open access as the default compliant route, Plan S moved the cost of publishing from reader-side subscriptions to author-side fees. Well-resourced institutions and grant-rich disciplines absorb this easily; early-career researchers, unfunded scholars, and institutions in lower-income countries do not. Critics — including Science (AAAS), in its 2024 “mixed review” of the policy — have argued this risks a pay-to-publish stratification that Plan S was meant to dismantle, not recreate.

    Disciplinary disparities. STEM fields, with large grant budgets and a journal-article-centred publishing culture, adapted to Plan S’s timelines relatively smoothly. Fields with smaller grants, more diffuse funding, or monograph- and edited-volume-centred outputs did not. A mandate calibrated to biomedical and physical-science funding flows does not transfer cleanly to a discipline where the primary scholarly output is a single-author book written over several years.

    The humanities and monograph fit problem. Books remain the primary currency of career advancement in much of the humanities. Open access book publishing carries different cost structures (often higher per-unit costs than a journal article), different licensing sensitivities (image rights, third-party permissions, translated quotations), and a much thinner diamond and institutional-press ecosystem to absorb the volume. Applying a journal-shaped policy to a book-shaped discipline was, on the evidence of cOAlition S’s own deferred treatment of monographs, recognised as a mismatch from the outset — yet the underlying tension has never been fully resolved.

    Open access route How it works Typical discipline fit Cost burden cOAlition S’s current stance
    Gold (APC) Author or funder pays a publication fee for immediate open access STEM, grant-funded fields Shifted to authors/funders Supported, but flagged as unsustainable at scale
    Green (repository, via RRS) Author-accepted manuscript deposited under a retained CC BY licence Broad, including HSS Low direct cost Core mechanism, actively promoted
    Diamond (no author or reader fees) Community- or institution-funded journals/platforms Broad, especially HSS and society publishing Institutional/consortial funding Increasing emphasis in the 2026–2030 strategy
    Transformative agreements Institutions pay combined subscription-plus-publishing deals STEM-heavy, large-consortium markets High, opaque Support being phased out

    cOAlition S’s Own Retreat From Rigidity

    What makes the sceptic’s case harder to dismiss is that cOAlition S has, in effect, conceded much of it. The coalition’s published strategy for 2026–2030 signals a deliberate shift away from the rigid instruments of the 2018 launch:

    • Support for transformative agreements — once framed as a transitional bridge to full open access — is being wound down, an implicit admission that offsetting deals entrenched incumbent publishers’ revenue rather than transforming the market.
    • The strategy explicitly states that “no single model can meet all needs”, formally endorsing a plurality of routes (green, diamond, community-owned platforms) instead of privileging APC-funded gold.
    • Diamond open access — non-APC, non-subscription publishing typically funded by consortia, learned societies, or institutions — receives markedly more strategic weight than it did in 2018, partly because it fits humanities and society-publishing contexts that APC-gold never did.
    • Implementation timelines and compliance routes have been extended and softened repeatedly since 2021, a pattern of flexibility that was largely absent from the original ten principles.

    None of this is framed by cOAlition S as a repudiation of Plan S. But read against the criticisms above, it is difficult to interpret the 2026–2030 strategy as anything other than a coalition adjusting a blanket mandate toward the differentiated approach critics have been requesting since 2018.

    Common Questions About Plan S

    What is Plan S in open access?

    Plan S is an open access mandate launched in 2018 by cOAlition S, a coalition of national research funders including UKRI and the Wellcome Trust. It requires that peer-reviewed outputs from coalition-funded research be made immediately open access on publication, either through a compliant journal or platform, or via a no-embargo repository deposit.

    Do I have to pay for open access?

    Not necessarily. Gold open access typically involves an article processing charge (APC) paid by the author or funder. Green open access via repository deposit and diamond open access (no author or reader fees) are both compliant, fee-free alternatives that Plan S — and increasingly cOAlition S’s own strategy — actively supports.

    Toward Differentiated Funder Mandates

    The evidence points toward a specific policy design failure rather than a failure of open access as a goal. A single compliance clock, a single funding assumption, and a single default route (APC-gold) were applied across disciplines with radically different publishing economies. The fix is not to abandon open access mandates but to differentiate them:

    • Route-neutral compliance that treats green, diamond, and gold as equally valid by default, rather than gold-as-default with green as an exception.
    • Discipline-aware timelines, recognising that a monograph-based field cannot realistically match a journal-article field’s production cycle.
    • Direct funding for diamond infrastructure in HSS fields, rather than expecting APC markets to develop where publishing economics do not support them.
    • Transparent reporting on cost-shifting, so funders and institutions can see whether a mandate is redistributing cost fairly or simply moving it from library budgets to grant budgets.

    For research administration teams managing funder compliance day to day, this is not an abstract debate — differentiated mandates mean different checklists, different budget lines, and different risk profiles by discipline, and institutional policy needs to reflect that variation rather than applying one open access rulebook across every faculty.

    Conclusion: What Should Come Next

    Plan S succeeded at the one thing a blanket mandate is good at: forcing the issue onto every funder’s and publisher’s agenda within a few years, where voluntary encouragement had achieved comparatively little in the preceding two decades. It failed, or at least strained badly, at the thing blanket mandates are structurally bad at — accommodating disciplinary and economic diversity. cOAlition S’s own 2026–2030 strategic pivot toward plural, discipline-flexible routes is the clearest evidence that the coalition has reached the same conclusion. The sensible reading is not “Plan S failed” or “Plan S succeeded”, but that the next generation of funder mandates should be designed as differentiated instruments from the outset, rather than retrofitted into flexibility five years after a rigid launch.

  • cOAlition S EU-Funded Projects: What Horizon Europe Grantees Must Still Do

    Search “cOAlition S EU-funded projects” and you land on a page that is easy to misread. It does not list the projects cOAlition S funds for grantees — it lists the European Commission grants that fund cOAlition S itself. That distinction matters for research administrators trying to work out which obligations actually attach to a Horizon Europe grant, and which belong to the separate, funder-driven Plan S mandate that the European Commission helped create.

    This piece reads that page on its own terms, then answers the practical question institutions actually have: given that the European Commission’s own Horizon Europe open access mandate already exists, where — if anywhere — does cOAlition S add anything a grantee still has to act on?

    What “EU-Funded Projects” Actually Lists on cOAlition S’s Site

    cOAlition S’s “EU-funded projects” resource page catalogues five Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 grants awarded to the European Science Foundation and partner consortia to build the infrastructure and evidence base around Plan S — it is not guidance aimed at individual grant recipients. Each entry names the funding call, the EU contribution, the duration and the coordinating institution.

    Project Funded under EU contribution Duration Coordinator
    OA-Advance HORIZON.4.2 €132,000 2024–2025 European Science Foundation (France)
    SOAR H2020-EU.5.e. €299,930 2020–2023 European Science Foundation (France)
    DIAMAS HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-43 €3,000,000 2022–2025 Aix-Marseille University (France)
    CRAFT-OA HORIZON-INFRA-2022-EOSC-01-02 €5,000,000 2023–2028 University of Göttingen Library (Germany)
    PALOMERA HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-ERA-01-42 €2,000,000 2023–2025 OPERAS (Belgium)

    The through-line is instructive: the European Commission is not a passive observer of Plan S. It is a funding partner for the studies (OA-Advance’s independent review of Plan S impact), tools (SOAR’s support for identifying compliant venues) and Diamond open-access infrastructure (DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA, PALOMERA) that keep the mandate operable. That funding relationship is the real answer to how cOAlition S and Horizon Europe are connected — and it is the fact most generic summaries of Plan S skip entirely.

    How cOAlition S and the Horizon Europe Mandate Overlap

    The European Commission is itself a cOAlition S member, alongside national funders including several that fund UK-based and other associated-country researchers, and the Horizon Europe open access mandate is, in substance, the Commission’s own implementation of Plan S principles inside its Model Grant Agreement. Both frameworks require:

    • Immediate open access to peer-reviewed publications, with no embargo period.
    • Deposit of the publication, or the accepted manuscript, in a trusted repository at the time of publication.
    • A Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, or equivalent, on journal articles and conference papers.
    • Author retention of sufficient rights to comply, regardless of what a publisher’s default policy allows.

    Because these baseline requirements are shared, a grantee who satisfies the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement’s open access clause will, in almost all cases, also satisfy Plan S. This is why cOAlition S materials describe Horizon Europe as an aligned implementation rather than a competing regime.

    Where cOAlition S Rules Still Add to the Horizon Europe Baseline

    Alignment is not identity. Three areas where the two frameworks are not simply interchangeable deserve attention from institutional research offices.

    Scope beyond the grant. Plan S is a funder mandate: it binds a researcher’s Plan-S-relevant output for as long as they hold funding from a cOAlition S member, not only the outputs tagged to a single Horizon Europe grant number. A researcher holding both a Horizon Europe grant and, say, a Wellcome or Research Council of Norway award is subject to the combined Plan S obligations of every cOAlition S funder involved — the Horizon Europe clause alone does not cover that.

    The compliance route. cOAlition S operationalises compliance through the Journal Checker Tool, which tells an author whether a specific journal, for their specific funder and affiliation, satisfies the mandate via the fully open access “Gold” route, a compliant transformative agreement, or the self-archiving Rights Retention Strategy route. The Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement states the requirement; the Journal Checker Tool is the operational instrument grantees actually use to verify a chosen venue — and it is a cOAlition S resource, not an EC one.

    Article Processing Charges in hybrid venues. Horizon Europe funding rules do not reimburse APCs for publishing in hybrid journals — subscription titles that also sell open access on a per-article basis — only in fully open access journals or platforms, including the Commission’s own Open Research Europe platform. Plan S’s broader principle is the same, but grantees who assume “my publisher offered an open access option” is automatically fundable frequently discover the hybrid exclusion applies regardless of which mandate they cite.

    Common Questions from Grantees

    What is an EU funded project?

    An EU-funded project is a research or coordination activity receiving a grant from a European Union programme such as Horizon Europe or its predecessor, Horizon 2020. In cOAlition S’s own case, five such projects — OA-Advance, SOAR, DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA — fund the coalition’s open access infrastructure and evidence base, not individual researchers’ compliance.

    Can the UK apply for EU funding?

    Yes. The UK re-associated to Horizon Europe from January 2024, meaning UK-based researchers can again apply for and hold Horizon Europe grants directly. UK recipients follow the same open access mandate as any other beneficiary, alongside any separate Plan S obligations from UK funders such as UKRI or Wellcome.

    Is cOAlition S the same body as the European Commission?

    No. cOAlition S is a voluntary alliance of national and private research funders, of which the European Commission is one member among roughly two dozen. The Commission sets Horizon Europe’s own grant conditions independently, but has aligned them closely with Plan S principles as part of that membership.

    Do Horizon Europe grantees need to follow Plan S separately from their grant agreement?

    Usually not in substance, since the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement already embeds Plan S’s core requirements. Grantees should still check Plan S obligations separately whenever a co-funder, prior grant, or institutional mandate outside Horizon Europe applies to the same publication.

    A Practical Compliance Checklist

    For research offices triaging a Horizon Europe-funded manuscript against both frameworks, the practical questions are the same regardless of which document a grant officer cites:

    1. Does the venue offer immediate open access with no embargo — checked directly, not assumed from the journal’s general reputation?
    2. Is a CC BY licence (or CC BY-NC / CC BY-ND for a monograph) applied to the published or accepted version?
    3. Has the author retained rights to deposit the accepted manuscript, independent of the publisher’s standard licence terms?
    4. If the venue is hybrid, has the team confirmed the APC is not eligible for reimbursement under Horizon Europe rules before committing funds?
    5. Do any other cOAlition S funders co-fund the same output, requiring a combined compliance check beyond the Horizon Europe grant alone?

    What This Means for Institutions

    The practical risk is not that Horizon Europe and Plan S conflict — it is that research offices treat “we’re Horizon Europe funded, so we’re covered” as a substitute for checking the venue, licence and co-funder picture on each output. Teams that build Journal Checker Tool and rights-retention verification into submission workflows, rather than relying on the Model Grant Agreement clause as a proxy, catch hybrid-APC and multi-funder edge cases before they become a post-award finding.

    For teams supporting research administration workflows across multiple funders, the EU-funded projects underpinning cOAlition S’s own infrastructure — particularly DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA’s work on Diamond open access publishing — are also worth tracking directly, since they signal where funder-preferred, no-fee publishing routes are likely to expand over the current Horizon Europe programming period.

    Outlook

    With DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA running through 2025 and 2028 respectively, and OA-Advance’s independent review due to feed recommendations on what comes after Plan S, the EU-funded projects on cOAlition S’s own page are best read as a forward signal rather than a static resource list. Institutions tracking them alongside their Horizon Europe grant terms — rather than treating the two frameworks as separate compliance tracks — will be better placed as Diamond open access infrastructure matures and funder mandates converge. CASRAI’s open research terminology reference provides further grounding for related definitions.

  • Open Access Mandate Compliance: What Seven Years of Plan S Data Show

    Seven years after cOAlition S launched Plan S in September 2018, the question is no longer whether funder mandates can move the needle on open access mandate compliance — it is what, specifically, moved, and what stayed stuck. cOAlition S’s own monitoring reports, rather than advocacy claims on either side, now give a reasonably clear evidence base for answering that.

    What Plan S Set Out to Achieve

    Plan S was convened through Science Europe with backing from the European Commission and the European Research Council. Its ten principles required that, from an implementation date eventually set at 1 January 2021 (pushed back a year from the original 2020 target), research funded by signatory organisations be published immediately open access, under an open licence, with no embargo.

    The coalition grew to more than two dozen public and philanthropic funders, including UKRI, Wellcome, and — aligned in principle if not formal membership — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Crucially, Plan S explicitly disfavoured hybrid subscription journals unless covered by a time-limited “transformative arrangement.”

    The Compliance Data: What Changed Since 2018

    Two mechanisms did most of the practical work. The Rights Retention Strategy, introduced in 2021, lets authors attach a CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript at submission — enabling compliant Green open access regardless of a publisher’s stated embargo. The Journal Checker Tool, launched the same year jointly with Wellcome and UKRI, lets authors verify funder-compliant routes journal by journal before submitting.

    According to cOAlition S’s own 2023 Annual Review, around 80% of research outputs from coalition-funded grants were published open access — above the roughly 60% global baseline for research generally. That gap is the strongest single piece of evidence that mandate-plus-tooling outperforms voluntary policy alone.

    • Gold OA (immediate, via publisher) became the most-used compliant route.
    • Green OA via the Rights Retention Strategy grew as a no-cost alternative.
    • Compliance has been consistently stronger in STEM fields than in humanities and social sciences, where funding structures differ.

    Publisher Pricing and Journal Behaviour

    Publisher behaviour shifted more than pricing transparency did. Transformative agreements — contracts bundling subscription access with open-access publishing rights — proliferated rapidly after 2018, particularly across Europe and North America; by 2024 they were supporting open-access status for well over 300,000 publications, accounting for a substantial share of global gold OA output.

    That growth came with a cost concern cOAlition S itself flagged: article processing charges concentrated financial risk on authors and institutions rather than reducing it. In response, cOAlition S announced it would stop funding “transformative journals” specifically after the end of 2024, and co-published an Action Plan for Diamond Open Access with Science Europe and OPERAS to seed no-fee, community-run alternatives.

    Route Author cost Plan S compliance status
    Gold (fully OA journal) Article processing charge, often funder-paid Compliant
    Green (Rights Retention Strategy) None Compliant, no embargo
    Hybrid via transformative agreement Bundled into institutional deal Compliant, time-limited
    Diamond/community-led None Compliant, prioritised post-2024

    The unresolved piece is longform outputs. A recent British Academy report found Book Processing Charges from larger publishers typically run £10,000–£20,000 per title, against a UKRI block-grant cap of £10,000 — and that only 18% of book records in UK institutional repositories actually hold the full text. The UK’s own REF 2029 exercise will not mandate open access for monographs this cycle; Research England confirmed in December 2024 it will apply from the following assessment period, from January 2029.

    Common Questions on Open Access Mandates

    What is an example of an open access initiative?

    Plan S is the clearest example: a funder-driven mandate launched by cOAlition S in 2018 requiring immediately open, freely reusable publication of any research these funders finance. Members include UKRI, Wellcome, the European Commission, and national research councils across more than a dozen countries.

    Do authors have to pay for open access?

    Not necessarily. Plan S’s Rights Retention Strategy lets authors deposit a CC BY-licensed accepted manuscript in a repository at no cost, satisfying compliance without an article processing charge. Gold open access typically requires a publication fee, which is why cost remains the mandate’s most contested feature.

    What are the disadvantages of open access?

    Critics point to article processing charges shifting costs from readers to authors, disadvantaging researchers at under-resourced institutions and in the Global South. Smaller and society publishers have struggled to compete for transformative agreements, and humanities disciplines have seen slower, patchier compliance than STEM fields.

    What exactly does open access mean?

    Open access mandate compliance means meeting a funder’s specific publishing requirements — typically an approved licence (usually CC BY), a maximum embargo period, and deposit in a recognised repository or journal. cOAlition S tracks this through annual monitoring reports rather than self-certification alone.

    What This Means for Institutions and Researchers

    For research administration teams, the practical upshot is that compliance now runs on tooling, not trust: the Journal Checker Tool and Rights Retention Strategy shifted the burden of proof from post-hoc audits to pre-submission checks. That has measurably raised article-level compliance rates without waiting for every journal to convert to full open access.

    It has not, however, solved cost equity. Institutions negotiating transformative agreements have effectively subsidised large commercial publishers’ transition, while smaller and society publishers, and now book publishers, face a structurally different cost problem that article-level mechanisms don’t reach. Consulting a shared reference point such as CASRAI’s open research dictionary can help teams keep licensing and embargo terminology consistent across funder policies.

    Where Plan S Goes Next

    cOAlition S’s 2023 “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal signalled a pivot away from journal-brand mandates toward funder-supported repositories and article-level open access, still under consultation. Combined with the Diamond Open Access Action Plan and the UK’s REF 2029 timeline for monographs, the next phase of Plan S looks less like a single global rule and more like a set of interoperating, funder-specific mechanisms — a shift that will make monitoring data, not policy text, the real measure of what “compliance” ends up meaning.

  • MRC and BBSRC Open Access Policy: How UKRI’s Research Councils Diverge

    Grant administrators handling awards that straddle more than one UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) council quickly discover that “one policy” does not mean “one set of instructions.” The MRC open access policy and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) open access policy both sit inside UKRI’s single overarching open access framework, yet the Medical Research Council (MRC) and BBSRC apply distinct additional expectations around Europe PMC deposit, embargo language and preprint citation. For institutions administering multi-council grants, those gaps — not the shared UKRI baseline — are where compliance actually breaks down.

    The shared UKRI foundation

    Since 1 April 2022, UKRI has run a single open access policy covering peer-reviewed research articles, conference papers and reviews acknowledging funding from any of its seven councils, including MRC and BBSRC. From 1 January 2024 the policy extended to monographs, book chapters and edited collections, requiring open access within 12 months of publication.

    For journal articles, the UKRI policy sets out two routes to compliance:

    • Route 1 (Gold): the publisher’s version of record is made immediately open access, typically under a CC BY licence.
    • Route 2 (Green): the author’s accepted manuscript is deposited in a repository and made immediately available at the point of publication.

    Both MRC and BBSRC researchers must comply with this baseline. The divergence begins with what each council layers on top of it.

    How MRC and BBSRC diverge in practice

    MRC’s own policy page states plainly that funded researchers are “expected to comply” with the UKRI policy and must ensure a copy of every in-scope publication is deposited in Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) at the time of final publication — a requirement MRC treats as mandatory, with a named contact ([email protected]) for compliance queries.

    BBSRC’s published guidance, by contrast, frames Europe PMC archiving as something researchers are “strongly encouraged” to do rather than an enforced condition, and separately states that BBSRC-funded results must be made freely available “no later than six months from the formal date of publication” — language that sits alongside, rather than fully aligned with, UKRI’s 2022 immediate-access requirement. In practice this means MRC administrators treat Europe PMC deposit as a hard compliance gate, while BBSRC administrators are working from softer, less current wording.

    Requirement MRC BBSRC
    Base policy UKRI open access policy UKRI open access policy
    Europe PMC deposit Required, tied to funding terms and conditions Strongly encouraged, not stated as mandatory
    Stated access timeline Immediate, per UKRI policy Guidance still references a 6-month freely-available window
    Preprints in applications Accepted, subject to MRC preprints policy Accepted; must carry a DOI and be under 5 years old
    Block grant / OA funding route UKRI block grant plus institutional strategic funding UKRI block grant plus a dedicated BBSRC Open Access Grant for strategically funded institutes

    The block grant distinction matters for multi-council awards: a BBSRC-funded institute receiving strategic funding is eligible for a separate BBSRC Open Access Grant on top of the standard UKRI block grant allocation, whereas MRC funding does not carry an equivalent parallel grant line. Administrators reconciling publication costs across a joint MRC–BBSRC award therefore need to identify which funding pot a given article’s costs should be drawn from, rather than assuming a single shared allocation.

    Common questions from grant administrators

    What is the MRC open access policy?

    The MRC open access policy requires researchers funded by the Medical Research Council to comply with the overarching UKRI open access policy and to deposit a copy of every in-scope publication in Europe PMC at the time of final publication, whether via the gold or green route.

    Does BBSRC require Europe PMC deposit?

    BBSRC’s guidance encourages researchers to archive published articles in Europe PMC but does not state this as a mandatory condition in the way MRC does, making it a softer compliance expectation that administrators should still track for biomedical-adjacent outputs.

    What is the difference between MRC and BBSRC open access requirements?

    Both follow the same UKRI baseline, but MRC treats Europe PMC deposit as compulsory while BBSRC treats it as encouraged, and BBSRC’s own guidance still references a six-month access window that predates UKRI’s 2022 immediate-access requirement.

    Will REF 2029 use the same open access policy as UKRI?

    The UK’s four higher education funding bodies have signalled that REF 2029 open access requirements will move closer to the UKRI framework, including extending expectations to long-form outputs, but REF policy is set separately from UKRI’s council-level rules and administrators should not assume identical scope or timing.

    REF 2029 open access alignment

    The Research Excellence Framework is administered by the four UK higher education funding bodies — Research England, the Scottish Funding Council, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland — not by UKRI’s research councils directly. For REF 2021, the open access policy applied to journal articles and conference proceedings, with a deposit window measured from acceptance rather than publication.

    For REF 2029, the funding bodies have indicated closer alignment with UKRI’s current policy, including bringing long-form outputs such as monographs into scope in a manner consistent with UKRI’s January 2024 monograph requirement. For a multi-council award spanning MRC and BBSRC funding, this means outputs already compliant with the UKRI open access route are well placed for REF eligibility, but administrators should confirm the specific REF 2029 rules once published rather than relying on UKRI compliance as an automatic proxy.

    Implications for multi-council award administrators

    The practical risk on a joint MRC–BBSRC grant is not non-compliance with the UKRI baseline — most institutions have that workflow embedded — but under-tracking the council-specific layer on top of it. Three things follow from the comparison above:

    1. Treat Europe PMC deposit as mandatory for any output acknowledging MRC funding, and as strongly recommended (verify locally) for BBSRC-only outputs.
    2. Do not assume a single open access funding pot covers a joint award; check whether the receiving institute holds a BBSRC Open Access Grant in addition to its UKRI block grant.
    3. Flag REF 2029 scope changes as a live item rather than a fixed rule, since final funding-body guidance may extend beyond the current UKRI monograph policy.

    Institutions supporting research administration across multiple UKRI councils benefit from building compliance checklists that separate “UKRI-wide” requirements from “council-specific” additions, rather than treating open access as a single monolithic policy. As REF 2029 guidance solidifies and UKRI continues its open access policy review, the gap between MRC’s stricter Europe PMC language and BBSRC’s older embargo wording is the clearest signal that “UKRI open access policy” is a floor, not a uniform standard — and that administrators verifying terminology such as gold, green and embargo routes should consult a maintained research administration dictionary alongside each council’s primary source.

  • Plan S Journal Checker Tool: A Step-by-Step Compliance Guide

    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:

    1. Go to journalcheckertool.org and enter the journal name or ISSN in the search field.
    2. Select the funder from the dropdown (only cOAlition S member funders are listed).
    3. Select the institution, or tick “No affiliation” if it does not appear or is not relevant.
    4. 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.
    5. 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.