CASRAI Dictionary

Author: MCP Service

  • 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.

  • Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies: A ROARMAP Guide for Research Administrators

    When a research office needs to check whether a funder requires immediate deposit or permits a twelve-month embargo, guesswork is not good enough. The registry of open access repository mandates and policies — known by its acronym ROARMAP — exists precisely to remove that guesswork. Maintained by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, it is a searchable, international catalogue of the open access mandates that universities, research institutions and funders have adopted, and it remains one of the few places where those policies can be compared side by side rather than tracked down one funder website at a time.

    This matters more in 2026 than it did a decade ago. Funder mandates have multiplied, cOAlition S members continue to refine Plan S implementation, and — as a June 2026 German constitutional ruling shows — even settled mandates can be challenged in court. Research administrators, library staff and compliance officers need a single reference point that tracks all of it. ROARMAP is that reference point.

    What ROARMAP catalogues, and why it matters

    ROARMAP began life in 2003 as the Institutional Archives Registry, built by the EPrints team at the University of Southampton. It was renamed the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies in 2006, then adjusted again, settling on its current name — Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies — around 2014. Throughout those renamings, its purpose stayed constant: track every publicly documented policy that requires or encourages researchers to make peer-reviewed outputs openly accessible, usually by depositing a copy in a repository.

    ROARMAP has a companion registry, ROAR (the Registry of Open Access Repositories), which indexes the repositories themselves rather than the policies that govern them. The distinction trips people up regularly, so it is worth setting out clearly alongside a third commonly confused resource, OpenDOAR.

    Registry What it indexes Typical use case
    ROARMAP Open access mandates and policies from institutions and funders Checking what a funder or institution requires
    ROAR Open access repositories themselves — location, size, growth Finding where a repository is hosted
    OpenDOAR Curated, vetted directory of repositories and their technical metadata Selecting a compliant repository to deposit into

    Entries in ROARMAP are not uniform in strength. Some record a simple recommendation to self-archive; others are mandatory policies where compliance is tied to continued grant funding — the sanction that gives a mandate real teeth. As of the last widely cited published count, ROARMAP had catalogued policies from more than 520 universities and over 75 research funders worldwide, a figure that has continued to grow as more institutions formalise their open access requirements.

    How cOAlition S members’ policies are catalogued

    cOAlition S is the group of research funders — including national funders, charitable foundations and the European Commission — that came together in 2018 to implement Plan S, the requirement that publicly funded research be made immediately open access without embargo. Because cOAlition S members are funders rather than repository operators, their individual mandates are exactly the kind of entry ROARMAP was built to hold.

    Each cOAlition S member’s policy is entered as a discrete record, so an administrator can look up, for example, what a specific national research council requires on licensing (typically CC BY), acceptable routes to compliance (Gold, Green with a zero-embargo repository deposit, or a transformative agreement), and how the policy interacts with the funder’s own compliance-monitoring tools, such as the Journal Checker Tool. Because ROARMAP predates Plan S by more than a decade, it also preserves the pre-2018 policy text for many of these funders, which is useful when institutions need to establish exactly when a requirement changed.

    This is a genuine information gain over simply reading each funder’s website individually: ROARMAP lets an administrator filter by funder type, country and adoption date, surfacing patterns — such as clusters of European funders tightening embargo terms in the same policy cycle — that are invisible from any single funder’s own page.

    Using the registry to compare institutional and funder mandates

    For day-to-day compliance work, ROARMAP is used less as a browsing tool and more as a lookup and benchmarking tool. A typical workflow for a research administrator looks like this:

    • Search by country or institution name to confirm whether a specific university has a formal mandate, and since when.
    • Filter by policymaker type — funder versus institution — to separate overlapping obligations on a single researcher.
    • Check the deposit timing and permitted embargo period recorded against each policy.
    • Note the required manuscript version — preprint, accepted manuscript or version of record.
    • Compare licensing requirements (commonly CC BY) where the policy specifies one.
    • Benchmark a draft institutional policy against comparable peer institutions before it goes to committee.

    This benchmarking use case is one of ROARMAP’s most practical applications. Rather than drafting an institutional open access policy from a blank page, a policy officer can pull several comparable universities’ mandates from the registry, line up their deposit windows and enforcement mechanisms, and use that comparison to justify the strength of a proposed new policy to institutional leadership.

    What is an open access repository?

    An open access repository is a freely accessible digital archive where researchers self-archive peer-reviewed articles, preprints or accepted manuscripts so readers can access them without a paywall. Universities run institutional repositories; funders and disciplines run subject-based ones. ROARMAP catalogues the policies requiring deposit — not the repositories themselves.

    How does OpenDOAR differ from ROARMAP?

    OpenDOAR is a curated directory listing vetted open access repositories and their technical characteristics, while ROARMAP lists the mandates and policies that require deposit into those repositories. Administrators typically use OpenDOAR to identify a compliant repository, then check ROARMAP to confirm whether deposit is compulsory and on what terms.

    What is self-archiving, and how do ROARMAP-listed policies define it?

    Self-archiving — the “Green” route to open access — means an author deposits a manuscript into a repository alongside, or instead of, publishing openly with a journal. Policies catalogued in ROARMAP typically specify the deposit timing, permitted embargo length, and which manuscript version satisfies the mandate.

    What are the drawbacks of relying on open access mandates?

    Mandates catalogued in registries such as ROARMAP vary widely in enforcement: some merely encourage deposit while others tie compliance to grant payment. Weak or unmonitored policies show low actual deposit rates, embargo terms conflict across funders, and legal challenges — as seen in Germany in 2026 — can unsettle even long-established mandates.

    What the changing legal landscape means for research administrators

    ROARMAP’s value is not static, and 2026 has already supplied a reminder of why. In June, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court struck down a state-level bylaw at the University of Konstanz that would have compelled researchers to exercise their statutory secondary-publication right — ruling that regulating copyright through employment or institutional statute conflicted with the federal government’s exclusive legislative competence over copyright law. The University of Konstanz noted afterwards that the ruling changed little in practice, because the great majority of its researchers already deposit voluntarily. But the case is a useful illustration for administrators elsewhere: a mandate’s formal status, its legal basis and its actual compliance rate can diverge, and a registry entry captures only the first of those three.

    That gap between formal mandate and practical uptake is exactly why registries such as ROARMAP function as compliance infrastructure rather than mere reference material. Institutions revising their own open access policy — whether to align with cOAlition S requirements, respond to a national research assessment exercise, or pre-empt a legal challenge — need a documented, dated record of what comparable institutions and funders actually require, not an assumption based on the last policy a colleague happened to read. For a wider view of how these obligations sit alongside contributorship and compliance frameworks more broadly, CASRAI’s research administration resources and dictionary of research terms provide further grounding.

    As funder policies continue to tighten and jurisdictions test the legal limits of mandated deposit, expect ROARMAP’s role to shift from a static archive towards a living reference that research offices consult routinely, alongside compliance checkers and repository directories, whenever a grant agreement, tenure case or institutional policy review depends on knowing exactly what an open access mandate actually requires.

  • cOAlition S Monographs: What the Open Access Policy Requires

    University presses tracking funder mandates often conflate two distinct policy layers. cOAlition S monographs guidance — the coalition-wide recommendations issued by the group of research funders behind Plan S — is not the same instrument as the Horizon Europe monograph mandate that already binds beneficiaries of European Commission grants. The two are related but legally and operationally distinct, and the gap matters for any press negotiating embargoes, licences, or rights-retention clauses with an academic author.

    This explainer sets out what cOAlition S itself asks of its 20-plus funder members regarding academic books, how that differs from the binding Horizon Europe rules, and where university presses need to track both.

    What cOAlition S Actually Recommends for Monographs

    Plan S, launched in 2018, was built around Principle 7, which acknowledged that “the timeline to achieve Open Access for monographs and book chapters will be longer and requires a separate and due process” than for journal articles. cOAlition S formalised its position on academic books — defined broadly to include monographs, book chapters, edited collections, and critical editions — in a dedicated statement published on 2 September 2021.

    Crucially, that statement is framed as a set of recommendations, not a uniform mandate. Individual cOAlition S organisations are asked to adopt the following within their own remits:

    • Academic books based on funded original research should be made open access on publication.
    • Authors or their institutions should retain sufficient intellectual property rights to enable open access and re-use.
    • Books should be published under a Creative Commons licence.
    • Embargo periods should be as short as possible and must never exceed 12 months.
    • Funders should financially support open access book publishing through dedicated schemes.

    This is a coordination framework, not a single rulebook. Each member funder — UKRI, Wellcome, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Science Foundation Ireland, and others — then writes its own policy inside those boundaries, which is precisely why embargo lengths and licence choices still vary from funder to funder.

    Timeline: How the Monograph Statement Emerged

    The gap between journal and book policy was deliberate, not an oversight. Plan S’s original 2018 principles applied in full to peer-reviewed journal articles from 1 January 2021, but books were explicitly carved out for a “separate and due process.” cOAlition S’s Implementation Guidance committed the coalition to issuing a books-specific statement “by the end of 2021” — a deadline it met with the September 2021 publication.

    Since then, cOAlition S has continued developing technical guidance for open access books in collaboration with existing infrastructure providers, including the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN open access books toolkit, rather than imposing a single technical standard by decree.

    Licensing and Embargo Rules Compared Across Funders

    Because cOAlition S sets a ceiling rather than a fixed rule, the practical requirements a university press encounters depend entirely on which funder supported the underlying research. The table below compares the coalition-wide recommendation with several member funders’ actual policies, including the European Commission’s Horizon Europe rules.

    Funder / Framework Scope Maximum embargo Licence
    cOAlition S (coalition recommendation) Academic books based on funded original research 12 months Any Creative Commons licence
    Horizon Europe (European Commission) All books, monographs and long-text outputs, if peer-reviewed 0 months (immediate) CC BY, CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC (or equivalent)
    UKRI Monographs, book chapters, edited collections (from 1 Jan 2024) 12 months Any Creative Commons licence
    Wellcome Scholarly monographs and book chapters 6 months CC BY preferred; other CC licences permitted
    FWF (Austria) Peer-reviewed research results of FWF-funded research 12 months (only if FWF has not financially supported the book) CC BY and CC BY-NC required
    Research Council of Norway Academic books, monographs, edited collections, anthology chapters 12 months (immediate recommended) CC BY, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC or equivalent

    The pattern is consistent: Horizon Europe is the strictest implementation of the cOAlition S framework, not a separate policy philosophy. As an EU funding programme whose managing body sits within cOAlition S, Horizon Europe simply exercises the option every member funder has — to set its own embargo and licence rules inside the coalition’s 12-month ceiling — and chooses the tightest possible setting: zero embargo.

    Where cOAlition S and Horizon Europe Overlap — and Diverge

    The overlap is principled: both frameworks require Creative Commons licensing, both expect rights retention sufficient to enable re-use, and both trace back to the same Plan S lineage. The divergence is procedural and binding. cOAlition S’s book statement is aspirational guidance that individual funders “will seek to adopt,” whereas the Horizon Europe rules sit inside the Model Grant Agreement that every beneficiary signs — making non-compliance a contractual, auditable matter rather than a best-practice lapse.

    What is Plan S?

    Plan S is an open access initiative launched in 2018 by cOAlition S, a group of national and international research funders. It requires immediate open access to peer-reviewed journal articles from funded research, with a separate, later-developed framework for monographs and book chapters.

    Does cOAlition S require open access for monographs?

    cOAlition S recommends rather than mandates open access for monographs. Its September 2021 statement asks member funders to adopt open access on publication, Creative Commons licensing, and a maximum 12-month embargo within their own policies — leaving each funder to set the binding rule.

    How does the Horizon Europe monograph mandate differ from cOAlition S?

    Horizon Europe imposes a binding, zero-embargo open access requirement for peer-reviewed monographs funded under the programme, embedded in its Model Grant Agreement. cOAlition S’s own statement is coalition-wide guidance permitting member funders up to a 12-month embargo, making Horizon Europe the strictest single implementation of that broader framework.

    What licence does cOAlition S recommend for open access books?

    cOAlition S recommends publication under any Creative Commons licence, without mandating a single variant. Horizon Europe narrows this for its own grantees to CC BY, CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC (or a licence with equivalent rights), reflecting the sector’s greater sensitivity around commercial and derivative rights for books than for journal articles.

    Implications for University Presses and Institutions

    For presses and library publishing units, the practical task is to identify the funder, not the coalition, before setting contract terms. A monograph funded partly by Horizon Europe money is bound by the zero-embargo rule regardless of what cOAlition S’s general statement permits; a monograph funded by an FWF grant that did not directly support book production may carry a 12-month embargo instead.

    Several operational consequences follow:

    • Contracts and rights-retention clauses should be drafted per funder, not per generic “Plan S compliance” assumption.
    • Long-term data preservation and hosting arrangements matter as much as the embargo date — cOAlition S technical guidance points presses toward trusted infrastructure such as DOAB and OAPEN, mirroring the repository requirements it already sets for journal articles and datasets.
    • Mixed-funding books (part Horizon Europe, part national funder) should default to the strictest applicable rule to avoid inadvertent non-compliance.
    • Research administration teams should track funder-specific embargo tables rather than relying on a single “Plan S” checklist, since the coalition itself does not enforce one.

    Institutions with dedicated research administration functions are best placed to reconcile these variations before contracts are signed, rather than after a book has gone to press. CASRAI’s broader work on funder compliance and research administration processes is directly relevant to teams building these internal checklists.

    What Comes Next

    cOAlition S has signalled it is moving toward a more flexible, multi-model approach to open access generally, following its own December 2025 strategy review — a shift chronicled by outlets including Chemistry World. For monographs specifically, this makes near-term convergence toward a single binding coalition-wide rule unlikely; the recommendation-based structure suits the genuine diversity of book publishing economics across disciplines and countries far better than a uniform mandate would.

    University presses should therefore expect the current two-tier reality to persist: a coalition-wide floor of open access, Creative Commons licensing and a 12-month embargo cap, with individual funders — Horizon Europe most prominently — free to set stricter terms for their own grantees. Tracking both layers, rather than treating “Plan S” as one monolithic rule, remains the only reliable compliance strategy.

  • Jisc Open Access Agreements: A cOAlition S Compliance Route Map

    UK research administrators juggling funder mandates now face a genuinely confusing question: does a given Jisc open access agreement actually satisfy a cOAlition S-aligned funder’s Plan S requirement, or does it only cover the invoice? Jisc negotiates centrally on behalf of UK higher education institutions, but the resulting deals are not automatically interchangeable with Plan S’s own compliance routes — and conflating the two is a common source of avoidable non-compliance findings at grant closeout.

    This route map sets out, mechanism by mechanism, how Jisc’s negotiated agreements map onto cOAlition S’s three approved compliance routes and the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) open access policy, so research offices can advise authors with confidence rather than by rule of thumb.

    What Jisc open access agreements actually negotiate

    Jisc negotiates three broad categories of open access agreement on behalf of its member institutions, governed by the UUK/Jisc Research Licensing Strategy Group and informed explicitly by the principles of Plan S and the OA2020 initiative:

    • Transitional (transformative) agreements — convert existing subscription spend into a combined fund covering both continued read access and open access publishing costs at hybrid and subscription titles (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and others).
    • Fully open access agreements — membership or flat-fee arrangements with born-open-access and society publishers, including current deals with ACM (2026–2028), MDPI’s Institutional Open Access Program (2026–2027) and PLOS’s flat-fee and Community Action Publishing licences (2026–2027).
    • Compliant green agreements — publisher commitments to an immediate, embargo-free, CC BY-licensed repository deposit route for authors who cannot or do not use a paid option.

    Springer Nature alone reports over 100 UK institutions participating in its Jisc-negotiated agreement, illustrating the scale of collective bargaining involved. These agreement types are the practical instruments; the compliance routes they need to satisfy come from cOAlition S itself.

    The three cOAlition S Plan S compliance routes

    cOAlition S launched Plan S in 2018, with implementation beginning on 1 January 2021. Its implementation guidance sets out exactly three routes by which a funded output can be considered compliant. Understanding these routes independently of any single publisher deal is the foundation for everything that follows.

    Plan S route What it requires Typical publication type
    Route 1 — Open access venue Publish in a fully open access journal or platform, immediately available under CC BY Gold OA / Diamond OA journals
    Route 2 — Transformative arrangement Publish in a subscription/hybrid journal covered by a recognised transitional agreement Hybrid journals under a Jisc transitional deal
    Route 3 — Repository deposit Deposit the author accepted manuscript (or, increasingly, version of record) immediately, with no embargo and a CC BY licence, often invoking the Rights Retention Strategy Any subscription journal, including those with no Jisc deal at all

    Route 3 matters most for institutional risk management: it is the fallback that keeps every author compliant even when no Jisc agreement exists for their chosen journal, or when an agreement’s funding allocation has already been exhausted for the year.

    Matching Jisc agreement types to each compliance route

    Jisc’s own three agreement categories were designed with these routes in mind, but the mapping is not always one-to-one, and research offices need to check eligibility at the point of submission rather than assume coverage.

    Jisc agreement type Plan S route satisfied Practical caveat for research offices
    Fully open access agreement Route 1 (OA venue) Confirm the specific journal or platform is listed under the current licence, not just the publisher brand
    Transitional (transformative) agreement Route 2 (transformative arrangement) Fund caps and corresponding-author eligibility rules mean coverage can lapse mid-year
    Compliant green agreement Route 3 (repository deposit) Requires active AAM deposit workflow — Jisc’s Publications Router can automate metadata and full-text delivery to the repository

    UKRI, a founding cOAlition S funder, layers its own 2021 open access policy on top of this framework: immediate open access is required for journal articles and conference proceedings from grants awarded on or after 1 April 2022, and for monographs, book chapters and edited collections from 1 January 2024. UKRI’s policy is designed to align with Plan S principles but is administered separately — an author can be UKRI-compliant via the same Gold, transformative, or Green routes described above, but institutions must check UKRI’s specific embargo and licensing terms rather than assume Plan S compliance automatically satisfies UKRI, or vice versa.

    Common questions from UK research offices

    What is a read and publish deal?

    A read and publish deal is a single institutional agreement, usually negotiated by a consortium such as Jisc, that bundles subscription access to a publisher’s journals with funded open access publishing rights for eligible corresponding authors, replacing separate read and pay-to-publish invoices.

    What are the three routes to Plan S compliance?

    cOAlition S recognises three routes: publishing in a fully open access journal or platform; publishing in a subscription journal under a recognised transformative arrangement; or depositing the accepted manuscript in a repository immediately, with no embargo and a CC BY licence.

    Is the UKRI open access policy the same as Plan S?

    No. UKRI is a cOAlition S founding funder and designed its 2021 open access policy to align closely with Plan S principles, but the two are administered separately, with UKRI setting its own effective dates, embargo rules and licensing requirements that research offices must check independently.

    Is Jisc’s Open Policy Finder the same as the Journal Checker Tool?

    No — they are commonly confused. Open Policy Finder is Jisc’s own tool for checking publisher and funder policies, while the Journal Checker Tool is operated independently by cOAlition S at journalcheckertool.org to confirm a specific journal-institution-funder combination against Plan S routes.

    A practical compliance checklist

    Research offices advising authors on a submission should work through the following before a manuscript goes out:

    1. Confirm whether the funder is a cOAlition S signatory, and separately whether UKRI-specific terms also apply.
    2. Check the target journal against the current Jisc agreement list for the author’s institution and publisher — agreement coverage varies by title, not just by publisher.
    3. Run the combination through cOAlition S’s Journal Checker Tool to confirm which of the three routes applies before submission, not after acceptance.
    4. Monitor transitional agreement fund caps; many UK institutions see APC allocations exhausted before the calendar year ends.
    5. Maintain a documented Green-route fallback — immediate AAM deposit with a Rights Retention Statement — for any journal outside a live agreement.
    6. Record the compliance route used against each output for funder reporting and REF-adjacent audit trails.

    Implications for research offices

    The practical risk sits less in the headline agreements than in their edges: mid-year fund exhaustion on transitional deals, journals moving in or out of coverage between renewal cycles, and corresponding-author eligibility rules excluding co-authors at non-participating institutions. Jisc’s multi-year renewals — the ACM Open Journals agreement running 2026–2028, PLOS licences renewed for 2026–2027 — give planning stability, but offices should treat every agreement as time-bound and re-verify eligibility annually rather than relying on a static internal list.

    There is also a structural shift underway toward Subscribe to Open and community-based membership models, which remove per-article APC decisions entirely but still require a compliant Green fallback under current Jisc guidance, since S2O agreements depend on enough institutions subscribing to unlock full participation. For research administration teams building durable workflows, the safest design principle is to treat Route 3 — immediate repository deposit — as the permanent baseline, with Jisc’s negotiated Routes 1 and 2 as opportunistic upgrades rather than the primary compliance mechanism.

    Looking ahead

    As UKRI’s open access policy embeds further into monograph and long-form publishing and Jisc continues renewing its publisher portfolio, the institutions with the least audit risk will be those that stopped treating “which Jisc deal applies” as the first question. The first question should be which Plan S route the output needs to satisfy; the applicable Jisc agreement, if one exists, is simply the most convenient way to deliver it. Research offices that build their author guidance and internal tooling — including terminology drawn from a shared open access dictionary — around the three compliance routes, rather than around individual publisher brands, will adapt fastest as agreements are renegotiated, replaced or allowed to lapse.

  • Budapest Open Access Initiative vs Plan S: Comparing Two Open Access Blueprints

    The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and Plan S are the two documents most frequently invoked when someone asks “what does open access actually require?” — yet they answer that question in almost opposite ways. BOAI is a voluntary declaration of principle from 2002; Plan S is a binding funder mandate from 2018. Readers arriving from searches around cOAlition S often want to know which framework applies to their situation, and why the two differ so sharply in enforceability. This piece sets out both, side by side, with the dates, mechanisms and licensing terms that distinguish them.

    What is the Budapest Open Access Initiative?

    BOAI arose from a small meeting the Open Society Institute convened in Budapest on 1-2 December 2001, and the resulting statement was released publicly on 14 February 2002. It was funded by a US $3 million grant from the Open Society Institute and signed initially by 16 individuals, including Peter Suber, Stevan Harnad, Michael Eisen and Jean-Claude Guédon — figures who went on to shape the wider open access movement.

    The declaration gave one of the first widely used definitions of open access: free availability on the public internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link to, or text-mine the full text, with the only constraint being authors’ right to control the integrity of their work and be properly credited.

    • Green open access: authors self-archive a copy of their peer-reviewed paper in an open repository.
    • Gold open access: journals publish articles openly from the outset, funded by means other than reader subscriptions.

    BOAI does not mandate either route, set a deadline, or monitor compliance. Its 10th-anniversary statement (2012) added a recommendation for CC BY licensing and repository infrastructure; its 20th-anniversary update (BOAI20, 2022) issued four high-level recommendations for the next decade. By 2023, over 6,800 individuals and 1,600 organisations had signed it. Alongside the 2003 Berlin Declaration and Bethesda Statement, BOAI is one of the three founding texts of the open access movement.

    What is Plan S?

    Plan S was launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, a group of national and international research funders including UKRI, several European research councils, and the European Commission. Unlike BOAI, Plan S is a mandate: it requires that, for research funded from 2021 onwards, resulting peer-reviewed publications must be made immediately open access — in a compliant journal, on a compliant platform, or via an open repository — with no embargo.

    Plan S sets out ten principles covering licensing, author rights and cost transparency. Its most consequential requirements are:

    • Open licensing — publications must carry an open licence, preferably CC BY.
    • Rights retention — authors or their institutions retain copyright rather than transferring it to the publisher.
    • No pure hybrid support — cOAlition S will not fund publication in subscription journals that offer paid open access options, except within time-limited transformative agreements.
    • Fee transparency — where article processing charges apply, they must be disclosed and justified.

    Because Plan S is tied to funding conditions, compliance is checked, and non-compliant publications can put a researcher’s funding eligibility at risk — a mechanism BOAI simply has no equivalent of.

    BOAI vs Plan S: a side-by-side comparison

    Feature Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) Plan S
    Launched 14 February 2002 4 September 2018
    Originator Open Society Institute-convened group of individuals cOAlition S (national/international research funders)
    Nature Voluntary declaration of principle Binding funder mandate
    Enforcement None — moral/advocacy suasion only Tied to grant funding conditions
    Preferred routes Green (self-archiving) and gold (OA journals) Compliant journal, platform, or repository, no embargo
    Licensing Not prescribed (CC BY recommended from 2012) Open licence required, CC BY preferred
    Implementation deadline None set Applied to research funded from 2021

    Key differences explained

    The clearest way to read the two documents is as different stages of the same movement. BOAI supplied the definition and the philosophical case for open access; Plan S supplied a compliance mechanism to accelerate uptake once voluntary adoption plateaued. Two decades on from BOAI, much subscription-journal literature remained closed, which is precisely the gap cOAlition S funders set out to close by attaching conditions to their money rather than relying on persuasion.

    A second difference is scope. BOAI addresses the entire scholarly community — researchers, institutions, publishers, governments — as a universal statement. Plan S applies specifically to researchers funded by cOAlition S members, so its reach is defined by funder membership rather than by field or geography.

    Common questions, answered

    What is the Budapest Open Access Initiative concerned with?

    The Budapest Open Access Initiative is concerned with making peer-reviewed research literature freely available online, without financial or legal barriers, so anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, or text-mine it, subject only to authors’ right to be properly acknowledged.

    What is the history of BOAI?

    BOAI emerged from a meeting the Open Society Institute convened in Budapest on 1-2 December 2001, was released publicly on 14 February 2002, and was followed by 10th-anniversary (2012) and 20th-anniversary (2022) recommendation updates.

    In which year did the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration take place?

    The Budapest meeting took place in December 2001, and the resulting declaration was formally released to the public on 14 February 2002, making it one of the founding texts of the open access movement.

    What is the difference between BOAI and Plan S?

    BOAI is a voluntary statement of principle with no enforcement mechanism, while Plan S is a binding funder mandate from cOAlition S requiring immediate open access, specific licensing, and compliance monitoring for funded outputs.

    What this means for institutions, researchers and publishers

    For research administrators, the practical takeaway is that BOAI and Plan S sit at different points of an institutional compliance stack. BOAI-aligned green open access — depositing a copy in an institutional or subject repository — remains a low-cost baseline that satisfies neither Plan S’s no-embargo rule nor its licensing requirement on its own, but supports discoverability and long-term preservation regardless of funder.

    Publishers navigating both frameworks typically need:

    • A CC BY (or equivalent open) licensing option at the article level.
    • A rights-retention pathway that does not require copyright transfer.
    • Transparent, itemised article processing charges where fees apply.
    • Repository-compatible metadata so green deposits can satisfy funder checks.

    Institutions should treat BOAI’s language as the shared vocabulary of open access policy — it is what most local and national OA policies still cite when defining terms — while treating Plan S (and successor funder mandates modelled on it) as the specific compliance checklist that determines whether a given grant-funded output is audit-ready.

    Two blueprints, one destination

    BOAI and Plan S are not competitors; they are sequential milestones in the same movement toward open scholarly communication. BOAI defined what open access means and why it matters; Plan S demonstrated what happens when funders convert that definition into a binding condition of grant compliance. Institutions that understand both — the founding principles and the enforcement mechanism layered on top — are better placed to build policies that satisfy funder mandates without losing sight of the broader access mission BOAI first articulated in 2002.

    Research-administration teams working across CRediT contributor roles, authorship policy, and funder compliance can find related terminology in the CASRAI Dictionary and further context in the research administration pillar.

  • cOAlition S Leaders Group Explained: Governance, Executive Steering Group and Funders

    What Is cOAlition S and How Is It Governed?

    Research administrators tracking open-access compliance often ask who is actually behind Plan S decisions. The cOAlition S Leaders Group is the top decision-making body of cOAlition S, the international consortium of research funders that launched Plan S in 2018 to mandate immediate open access to publicly funded research.

    cOAlition S itself has no autonomous legal capacity. It is, in its own words, “an informal alliance of organisations and institutions that fund and/or perform research activities” whose members have publicly committed to implementing Plan S principles. That single fact shapes everything else about its governance: policy is agreed collectively, but enforcement remains the legal responsibility of each individual funder.

    Governance runs through three tiers: the Leaders Group sets strategy, the Executive Steering Group implements it, and a secretariat provides day-to-day operational support. Two supporting bodies — an Experts Group and a network of Open Access Ambassadors — feed technical advice and community feedback into the process.

    The Leaders Group: Where Plan S Policy Is Set

    The Leaders Group is composed of the heads of cOAlition S member organisations — national and regional research funders, philanthropic funders, and the European Commission. It approves the coalition’s overall strategy, agrees the principles that Plan S-aligned policies must follow, and appoints both the Executive Director and the Executive Steering Group.

    As of 2026, the Leaders Group is chaired by Mari Sundli Tveit, Chief Executive of the Research Council of Norway and President of Science Europe — a dual role that illustrates how tightly cOAlition S governance and Science Europe leadership now overlap.

    A sample of Leaders Group representation, drawn from cOAlition S’s published governance list, shows the geographic and institutional spread involved:

    Member organisation Country / region Leaders Group representative
    Research Council of Norway Norway Mari Sundli Tveit (Chair)
    Research Council of Finland (AKA) Finland Floora Ruokonen
    French National Research Agency (ANR) France Claire Giry
    Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) Slovenia Mirjam Dular
    European Commission European Union Marc Lemaître
    Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) Portugal Francisco Santos
    Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) United States (philanthropic) Bodo Stern
    Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) United States (philanthropic) Randy Schekman

    Membership turns over as staff change roles, so the current, authoritative composition is always the governance list published on coalition-s.org rather than any secondary source — including this one.

    The Executive Steering Group, Director, and Secretariat

    Below the Leaders Group sits the Executive Steering Group, which translates approved strategy into an operational work plan and supervises the cOAlition S Office. It is chaired by Lidia Borrell-Damián, Secretary General of Science Europe — again reflecting the close personnel overlap between the two bodies.

    Day-to-day leadership sits with the Executive Director, who leads the Executive Steering Group and acts as the coalition’s principal spokesperson. Leadership has changed hands recently: Johan Rooryck stepped down in July 2025 after six years in the role, a period that saw the coalition’s fastest growth. Curt Rice, a former university rector, was subsequently appointed Director in May 2026 to lead strategy implementation.

    Operational and financial support is provided by the secretariat, which is appointed by and reports to the Leaders Group. The secretariat’s hosting arrangement has itself shifted: cOAlition S functions moved from the European Science Foundation to OPERAS AISBL, a Brussels-based research infrastructure for open scholarly communication, which now hosts the cOAlition S Secretariat.

    The coalition’s own published figures show its office budget has contracted sharply as activities matured: total spending fell from roughly €1.12 million in 2022 to €545,167 in 2025, with staffing dropping from 3.5 FTE (2022–23) to around 2 FTE in 2025, partly reflecting the sunsetting of the Journal Comparison Service in early 2025.

    • Leaders Group — policy-making and strategic direction
    • Executive Steering Group — implementation and oversight of the work plan
    • Secretariat (OPERAS AISBL) — finance, operations, communications
    • Experts Group — technical and policy advice
    • Open Access Ambassadors — community outreach and feedback

    Answer-First: Common Questions on cOAlition S Governance

    Who sits on the cOAlition S Leaders Group?

    The Leaders Group is made up of the heads of cOAlition S member organisations — national and regional research funders, philanthropic funders, and the European Commission. It approves overall strategy, agrees Plan S principles, and appoints the Executive Director and Executive Steering Group.

    What does the cOAlition S Executive Steering Group do?

    The Executive Steering Group turns Leaders Group strategy into an operational work plan and supervises the cOAlition S Office. It is chaired by the Secretary General of Science Europe, while the coalition’s Executive Director leads day-to-day delivery and public representation.

    Who is the current director of cOAlition S?

    Curt Rice was appointed Director of cOAlition S in May 2026, succeeding Johan Rooryck, who stepped down as Executive Director in July 2025 after six years leading the coalition through its period of fastest growth and expansion.

    Where is the cOAlition S secretariat based?

    The cOAlition S Secretariat is hosted by OPERAS AISBL, a research infrastructure for open scholarly communication based in Brussels, Belgium. It replaced the European Science Foundation as host and now provides operational, financial, and communications support to the coalition.

    Member Funders and the Science Europe Connection

    cOAlition S is frequently — and inaccurately — conflated with Science Europe, the Brussels-based association of European research funding and research-performing organisations. The two are formally distinct bodies with separate mandates, but the overlap in senior personnel is real and consequential: both the Leaders Group chair and the Executive Steering Group chair currently hold senior Science Europe positions.

    This overlap matters for institutions tracking policy signals. When Science Europe’s governing board discusses open-access principles, the same individuals frequently carry those positions into cOAlition S Leaders Group meetings, and vice versa. Research offices monitoring funder mandates should therefore treat Science Europe statements and cOAlition S announcements as related but not interchangeable — each body has its own decision process and its own binding effect on individual funders’ policies.

    Member funders span national research councils (Norway, Finland, France, Slovenia, Portugal, among others), the European Commission, and private philanthropic funders such as HHMI and ASAP. Each retains full legal responsibility for enforcing its own open-access policy — cOAlition S coordinates the principles, but compliance monitoring (for example through the Journal Checker Tool) happens at the level of the individual funder.

    What This Means for Institutions, Publishers, and Researchers

    For research administration and funder-compliance teams, the practical implication is that Plan S obligations are not centrally enforced. Institutions should track the specific published policy of whichever cOAlition S funder supports a given grant, rather than assuming a single unified cOAlition S rulebook applies everywhere.

    For publishers, the leadership transition to a new Director in 2026, alongside the secretariat’s move to OPERAS, signals a period of operational change rather than a shift in Plan S’s core open-access principles. The coalition entered a new 2026–2030 strategic phase that reaffirms open access while broadening its remit toward “rapid, open, transparent, and equitable” sharing of research more generally — a scope expansion worth watching for anyone tracking open-science mandates rather than open-access mandates narrowly.

    For anyone building funder-compliance workflows, the governance map is straightforward once separated into its three tiers: strategy (Leaders Group), implementation (Executive Steering Group and Director), and operations (Secretariat). Understanding which tier issued a given statement helps determine whether it reflects settled policy or an in-progress work plan.

  • What Is cOAlition S? A Guide to the Funder Coalition Behind Plan S

    What Is cOAlition S? (Quick Answer)

    So, what is cOAlition S? It is an international consortium of research funding and research-performing organisations that launched on 4 September 2018 to accelerate full and immediate open access to publicly funded research. It was announced jointly by a group of national research funders, with the backing of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), and was co-initiated by Marc Schiltz, then President of Science Europe, and Robert-Jan Smits, at the time the European Commission’s Open Access Envoy.

    cOAlition S does not itself publish research or set library policy. It is the funder-side alliance that authored, endorses and operationally enforces a single open-access policy framework known as Plan S. Understanding that split — a coalition of institutions on one side, a compliance mandate on the other — is the single most useful fact for anyone trying to interpret a funder’s open-access requirements.

    cOAlition S vs Plan S: Why the Distinction Matters

    The two names are often used interchangeably in casual conversation, but they refer to different things. cOAlition S is a group of organisations; Plan S is the policy those organisations agreed to implement. Confusing the two leads to real compliance errors — for example, assuming that a funder is bound by Plan S because it is described alongside cOAlition S in a news article, when in fact membership and mandate adoption are two separate steps.

    Aspect cOAlition S Plan S
    What it is A consortium of funding and research-performing organisations A policy framework of one target and ten principles
    Launched 4 September 2018 4 September 2018 (announced alongside cOAlition S)
    Function Governs, funds and enforces the mandate Defines what “full and immediate open access” requires
    Core requirement Not applicable — the coalition is the implementing body Publications from funded research must appear in an open-access journal, platform or repository without embargo
    Who it binds Member funders, who then bind their grant-holders Researchers funded by a cOAlition S member, once that funder adopts the policy

    In short: if a researcher asks “does Plan S apply to my grant?”, the answer depends on whether their funder is a cOAlition S member and has implemented the policy in its grant conditions — not simply on whether the funder is mentioned in Plan S coverage.

    Origins, Governance and Membership

    cOAlition S grew out of frustration among European funders that voluntary open-access recommendations were not shifting publisher behaviour fast enough. The founding principle, published on launch day, states:

    “With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.”

    Membership expanded steadily after the 2018 launch. By its five-year anniversary in September 2023, cOAlition S had grown from around a dozen founding funders to a network of 28 funders spanning Europe and beyond. Notable participants and supporters over the years have included:

    • UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
    • Wellcome Trust (joined November 2018)
    • Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (joined November 2018)
    • Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
    • Academy of Finland
    • Research Council of Norway
    • Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)
    • National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia (NHMRC)

    Governance has not been static. The European Research Council backed cOAlition S at launch in 2018 but withdrew its formal support in July 2020, while remaining aligned with open-access goals more broadly — a reminder that “coalition member” status can change even after a funder has publicly endorsed the framework. cOAlition S’s day-to-day secretariat function has also evolved; the organisation operates under the European Science Foundation’s science-policy-support activities and has continued to update its operating structure, including a new strategy for 2026–2030 published in November 2025.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is Plan S?

    Plan S is the open-access policy framework created and endorsed by cOAlition S. It requires that, from 2021, all peer-reviewed publications resulting from grants awarded by a participating funder be made immediately and freely available, without embargo, in a compliant open-access journal, platform or repository.

    What does the “S” in Plan S stand for?

    According to Robert-Jan Smits, the plan’s chief architect, the “S” stands for “shock” — reflecting the coalition’s intent to jolt scholarly publishing into a faster transition to open access, rather than relying on the slower, voluntary approach that had dominated the previous two decades.

    How many funders belong to cOAlition S?

    Membership has grown considerably since 2018. cOAlition S expanded from roughly a dozen founding funders to a network of 28 funders by its five-year anniversary in September 2023, and the coalition continues to invite public and private research funders worldwide to join.

    Is cOAlition S a government body?

    No. cOAlition S is not a government agency; it is a voluntary alliance of research funders — national funding councils, the European Commission, and charitable foundations such as Wellcome Trust — that have agreed to coordinate their own grant conditions around a shared open-access target.

    Why the Distinction Matters for Compliance

    For research administrators, institutional open-access librarians and grants offices, the cOAlition S / Plan S distinction is not academic. Compliance obligations attach at the funder level, not automatically at the field or discipline level. Two practical consequences follow.

    • Check the funder, not the field. A researcher can work in a Plan S-adjacent discipline and still have no Plan S obligation, because their specific funder has not joined cOAlition S or has not yet implemented the policy in its own grant terms.
    • Track transitional allowances separately from the core mandate. During the transition period, Plan S permits publication in “transformative journals” — hybrid titles covered by an agreement to convert fully to open access — which sit outside the strict letter of the core principle but remain compliant under cOAlition S guidance.

    Because cOAlition S retains the authority to revise implementation guidance — including its Rights Retention Strategy, which lets funded authors apply a CC BY licence to the author’s accepted manuscript regardless of a publisher’s own policy — institutions need to monitor cOAlition S announcements directly rather than relying solely on secondary summaries.

    Looking Ahead: cOAlition S in 2026

    Plan S is often described in retrospective terms, as though the 2021 deadline closed the story. It did not. cOAlition S published a new strategy covering 2026–2030 in November 2025, signalling continued activity around rights retention, diamond open access and equitable publishing models rather than a wind-down. For institutions still mapping which of their funders carry a live Plan S obligation, the coalition’s own organisations page remains the authoritative, continuously updated source — far more reliable than any static list, including this one.

    Research administrators managing multi-funder compliance can pair that funder-by-funder check with CASRAI’s broader research administration resources for context on how open-access mandates fit within the wider compliance landscape institutions now navigate.

  • Towards Responsible Publishing: cOAlition S’s Vision for a Post-APC Scholarly System

    What Is the Towards Responsible Publishing Proposal?

    Towards Responsible Publishing is a draft proposal published by cOAlition S — the international consortium of research funders behind Plan S — in October 2023. It sets out a vision and a set of principles for a future scholarly communication system, together with a mission that enables funders, working with other stakeholders, to help deliver it.

    The proposal builds directly on Plan S, the 2018 funder commitment to full and immediate open access. Five years on, cOAlition S argues that publishing practice has not kept pace with how research is actually produced, shared and used. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how slow traditional peer-reviewed publishing can be when speed matters, accelerating researcher adoption of preprints, open peer review and scholar-led “diamond” publishing models that charge neither authors nor readers.

    Where Plan S targeted the terms of open-access mandates, Towards Responsible Publishing targets the underlying business model. cOAlition S describes subscription charges and, over time, article processing charges (APCs) as “highly inequitable” — since both make publication and access contingent on institutional or author ability to pay — and proposes shifting the system towards one that authors, not payment capacity, control.

    The Principles cOAlition S Sets Out for a Post-APC System

    Rather than mandating a single replacement model, the proposal frames a direction of travel. The themes that run through the proposal and its subsequent consultation include:

    • Author control over dissemination — researchers decide when and how their work is shared, rather than being routed through a single high-cost venue.
    • Preprinting as a default step — early, open sharing of findings ahead of formal peer review, already the practice cOAlition S credits with speeding up pandemic-era science communication.
    • Open, transparent peer review — reports published alongside articles, with the consultation later finding a researcher preference for reviewer anonymity even within open models.
    • Permissive, open licensing — enabling reuse without funder mandates being experienced as impositions on academic practice.
    • Redirected resourcing — shifting funds currently spent on subscriptions and APCs towards scholar-led and community-owned publishing infrastructure over time.

    The following table sets out how the three dominant funding models compare on who pays and where the equity risk sits — the core tension the TRP proposal is trying to resolve.

    Model Who pays Reader access Main equity concern
    Subscription Institutions/libraries Paywalled unless subscribed Excludes under-resourced institutions from reading
    APC (gold OA) Author or their institution/funder Free to read Excludes under-resourced authors from publishing
    Diamond OA Funders, institutions, consortia (not per-article) Free to read Free to publish, but depends on sustained collective funding

    The Global Consultation and the Diamond Open Access Connection

    Because a scholar-led system depends on buy-in from the research community it is meant to serve, cOAlition S commissioned a global consultation, delivered by Research Consulting and Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), running from November 2023 to May 2024. It engaged more than 11,600 respondents worldwide: 440 responses to an initial stakeholder feedback survey, 72 focus-group participants, and 11,145 responses to an online global researcher survey — supplemented by 10 organisational feedback letters solicited specifically to offset an initial underrepresentation of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

    The published findings, released via Zenodo in mid-2024, showed broad cross-regional and cross-disciplinary support for preprint posting, permissive licensing and open peer review. But they also surfaced a hard constraint: researchers, particularly in LMICs, remain dependent on journal indexes and impact factors when choosing where to publish, because career and funding assessment still rewards them. Without reform of research assessment running in parallel, the consultation warned, TRP risks being read as an imposition by well-resourced nations on researchers who cannot easily disengage from prestige metrics.

    This is precisely where diamond open access enters the picture. Diamond journals and platforms — typically scholar-led, community- or institution-owned, and free to both authors and readers — are the closest existing proof that a non-APC system can function at scale. cOAlition S’s own account of the “developments forcing a rethink” explicitly names diamond models pioneered in Latin America as evidence that scholar-led publishing services are viable, not theoretical. Search demand data reinforces the parallel interest: “diamond open access” and comparison queries such as “diamond open access vs gold open access” show sustained monthly search volume, indicating institutions and researchers are actively trying to map their own funding-model choices onto exactly the debate TRP is having at the funder level.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is the Towards Responsible Publishing proposal?

    Towards Responsible Publishing (TRP) is a draft proposal published by cOAlition S in October 2023 that sets out a vision and set of principles for a future scholarly communication system less dependent on subscription and article-processing-charge funding, alongside a mission for funders to help deliver it.

    How many researchers took part in the cOAlition S consultation on TRP?

    Over 11,600 respondents took part between November 2023 and May 2024, run by Research Consulting and Leiden University’s CWTS, comprising 440 stakeholder-survey responses, 72 focus-group participants and 11,145 responses to a global researcher survey.

    Does Towards Responsible Publishing abolish APCs immediately?

    No. The proposal and its consultation findings point to a phased transition: encouraging preprints and open licensing in the short term, open peer review in the medium term, and reforming incentives and funding flows away from APCs only over the longer term.

    How does Towards Responsible Publishing relate to diamond open access?

    TRP treats diamond open access — publishing that is free to both authors and readers, typically run by scholar-led or institutional platforms — as a proof point that scholarly communication can work without per-article charges, and frames redirecting resource towards such infrastructure as a long-term goal.

    Implications for Research Administrators and Institutions

    For research offices, libraries and funders, TRP is not yet a mandate — it is a signal of direction that carries planning consequences well before any policy takes effect.

    • Budget modelling: institutions that have built read-and-publish or transformative agreements around APC-equivalent spend should model what a partial shift of that spend towards diamond infrastructure funding would look like.
    • Assessment reform: the consultation’s own finding — that journal prestige metrics still drive author behaviour — means research administrators supporting responsible research assessment (aligned with DORA-style commitments) are addressing a root cause TRP itself identifies, not a side issue.
    • Author guidance: research offices advising on authorship and publication strategy should track which venues already operate open peer review or preprint-first workflows, since early adoption reduces future compliance friction if funder policy converges on TRP principles.
    • Equity due diligence: institutions in LMICs, and those partnering with them, should note the consultation’s own caveat about underrepresentation and imposition risk when adopting TRP-aligned practices unilaterally.

    These are exactly the kind of process and policy interpretation questions that sit within the remit of research administration teams tracking funder requirements ahead of formal rollout.

    Outlook: What Happens Next

    cOAlition S committed to publishing a full response to the consultation findings, working through what a revised proposal would mean in practice for its member funders. The direction of travel is clear even where the timeline for full implementation is not: preprints and open licensing first, open peer review next, and structural reform of funding flows and assessment incentives as the long-term goal. Institutions, publishers and scholarly societies with a stake in how scholarly communication is funded have a genuine window to shape that revision rather than simply react to it once finalised.

    What distinguishes Towards Responsible Publishing from earlier reform pushes is its explicit acknowledgement that funder mandates alone cannot fix a system-level incentive problem — reform has to touch assessment, infrastructure funding and author behaviour simultaneously, or risk being another well-intentioned policy that the underlying prestige economy simply routes around.

  • cOAlition S Price Transparency: How the Journal Comparison Service Worked

    cOAlition S, the funder coalition behind Plan S, spent five years building infrastructure meant to make open-access publishing costs auditable. cOAlition S price transparency requirements, first set out in guidance published on 18 May 2020, obliged publishers receiving Plan S-funded articles to disclose how article processing charges (APCs) and subscription fees break down across editorial, peer-review, production, and hosting services. The delivery mechanism for this — the Journal Comparison Service (JCS) — went live in 2022 and was retired on 30 April 2025. This explainer sets out what the Price and Service Transparency Framework required, how the JCS worked while it operated, and what its closure means for institutions still trying to benchmark open-access costs.

    What Is the cOAlition S Price and Service Transparency Framework?

    Plan S Principle 5 states that where open-access publication fees are applied, they must be “commensurate with the publication services delivered” and the fee structure must be transparent. To operationalise this, cOAlition S endorsed two independently developed frameworks for standardising what publishers disclose.

    The first, commissioned from Information Power and funded by Wellcome and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), was piloted in early 2020 with ten publishers, including Springer Nature, PLOS, Hindawi, EMBO, and the Institute of Physics Publishing. It defines 24 metadata fields across three parts: journal bibliographic and pricing data, contextual quality metrics (acceptance rates, peer-review turnaround, publication frequency), and a percentage breakdown of list price across service categories.

    The second, the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA) framework, groups disclosure into seven broader “service baskets” and has been adopted independently by Frontiers, MIT Press, Copernicus, and MDPI.

    Framework Developed by Structure Known adopters
    Price and Service Transparency Framework Information Power (funded by Wellcome and UKRI) 24 metadata fields in 3 parts (bibliographic, contextual, price-by-service) JCS’s sole framework from November 2024; piloted by 10 publishers in 2020
    Publication Services and Fees framework Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA) 7 (extensible to 10) service baskets Frontiers, MIT Press, Copernicus, MDPI

    Under the Information Power model, publishers apportioned price across roughly eight cost categories, covering journal development and management, peer-review administration, production (typesetting, copy-editing), publication and hosting infrastructure, dissemination and marketing, general and administrative overheads, other costs, and surplus or profit margin.

    How the Journal Comparison Service Worked

    The Journal Comparison Service was a secure, free-of-charge online platform, built by Cottage Labs (working with Antleaf) on behalf of the European Science Foundation, which administers cOAlition S. It began accepting publisher submissions from May 2022 and opened to approved library, consortium, and funder users from September 2022.

    Access was strictly partitioned: a publisher could see only its own submitted data, and authorised institutional users were bound by a legally binding agreement not to share the commercially sensitive figures — a design intended to satisfy competition-law concerns while still letting buyers compare value for money.

    • Publishers registered and submitted journal-level data via the standard framework template.
    • cOAlition S validated submissions and loaded them into the secure portal.
    • Libraries, consortia, and funders applied for authorised access to browse and compare disclosed data.
    • A companion tool, the Journal Checker Tool, flagged whether a given journal had submitted data to the JCS at all.

    What is the cOAlition S Price and Service Transparency Framework?

    It is a set of endorsed disclosure standards requiring publishers of open access journals to itemise how their fees break down across editorial, peer-review, production, and hosting services. cOAlition S endorsed two versions — one from Information Power and one from the Fair Open Access Alliance — so buyers could compare pricing on a like-for-like basis.

    What must publishers disclose under the framework?

    Publishers submit bibliographic details (journal name, ISSN, list prices), contextual quality metrics such as acceptance rate and peer-review turnaround, and a percentage breakdown of the total fee across defined service categories, including production, hosting, and administrative overhead.

    Is the Journal Comparison Service still active?

    No. cOAlition S discontinued the JCS on 30 April 2025 after registering only 105 end users and 163 access sessions in 2024, judging the service’s reach too limited to justify its running costs. The underlying disclosure frameworks remain endorsed in principle.

    How did libraries and funders use the Journal Comparison Service?

    Authorised library consortia and funders used JCS data to check whether APC and subscription charges were proportionate to services rendered, informing negotiation of transformative and read-and-publish agreements and internal guidance to researchers on cost-effective publishing choices.

    Adoption Trajectory and the April 2025 Closure

    The JCS launched strongly: 27 publishers agreed to share data at inception, covering more than 2,000 journals. Three years on, publisher participation had nominally grown to 37 — but the journals actually represented had collapsed to just 549, as several large early adopters scaled back or withdrew coverage.

    Demand-side uptake was weaker still. By the end of 2024, only 105 individuals were registered as end users across all participating libraries, consortia, and funders worldwide, and the platform recorded just 163 access sessions for the entire year.

    Metric At launch (2022) End of 2024
    Participating publishers 27 37
    Journals represented 2,000+ 549
    Registered end users n/a (new service) 105
    Platform access sessions (annual) n/a 163

    Faced with high maintenance costs against that usage, cOAlition S announced on 3 February 2025 that it would sunset the JCS effective 30 April 2025. In the announcement, cOAlition S acknowledged that the service had not fulfilled its original ambition, citing insufficient publisher journal coverage and limited registration among libraries and consortia relative to the cost of running the platform. The underlying source code has been released on GitHub for reuse by other organisations that want to build comparable tools.

    Implications for Libraries, Funders, and What Comes Next

    For research administrators and library staff who built workflows around JCS data, the closure removes a single, standardised comparison point — but not the underlying disclosure expectation. Plan S Principle 5 still requires that open-access fees be transparent and commensurate with services delivered; institutions negotiating transformative agreements will now need to request itemised pricing directly from publishers, or rely on the still-endorsed FOAA and Information Power framework templates as a negotiating checklist.

    • Use the published framework templates directly with publishers during contract renewal or transformative-agreement negotiation.
    • Treat the archived JCS guides and the GitHub codebase as a reference for building institution- or consortium-level comparison tools.
    • Continue using the Journal Checker Tool to confirm a journal’s compliant open-access routes under Plan S, independent of JCS status.

    The episode is a useful case study for anyone in research administration weighing whether to build shared infrastructure for cost transparency: a well-designed, funder-backed, free tool still failed to reach critical mass when neither side of the market — publishers submitting full catalogues, or libraries registering to use it — had a strong enough incentive to engage consistently. Readers building out institutional glossaries around APCs, transformative agreements, and related open-access terminology can cross-reference definitions in the CASRAI Dictionary.

    cOAlition S has signalled it is not abandoning the transparency principle itself, even as the JCS platform closes. Institutions should expect price and service disclosure to remain a live negotiating point in open-access contracts, delivered through direct publisher engagement and framework templates rather than a centralised comparison portal, at least for the foreseeable future.