CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: CC BY licence

  • ACM Open Access vs Plan S: 2026 Compliance Check

    ACM open access is now the default, not an option: since 1 January 2026 the Association for Computing Machinery publishes all journals, conference proceedings and magazines under a fully open-access model, replacing its previous hybrid Read & Publish arrangement. Under the CC BY licence, zero-embargo release and author-retained copyright that now apply across the ACM Digital Library, the model satisfies cOAlition S’s Plan S licensing, immediacy and rights-retention requirements — closing a compliance gap that existed while ACM operated as a transformative agreement.

    ACM Open is the Read & Publish framework through which participating institutions pay a fixed annual fee, based on their average publishing output over the previous three years, in exchange for unlimited open-access publishing by their corresponding authors and full institutional read access to the ACM Digital Library.

    What is ACM open access?

    As of 1 January 2026, ACM transitioned every journal, magazine and conference proceeding in the ACM Digital Library to full open access, removing the mixed subscription/hybrid model that had applied since the ACM Open programme launched in 2020. The ACM Digital Library itself was split into two tiers on the same date: a free Basic edition giving open access to ACM’s full published corpus, and a paid Premium edition adding discovery tools, usage metrics, citation management and the ACM Guide to Computing Literature.

    Institutional participation still runs through ACM Open, ACM’s Read & Publish framework. Corresponding authors at a subscribing institution publish an unlimited number of open-access articles without paying an article processing charge (APC) directly; the institution instead pays one fixed annual fee tied to its historical publishing volume. Authors at non-participating institutions can still publish open access but may be liable for an APC.

    What does Plan S actually require?

    Plan S is the funder-driven open-access mandate coordinated by cOAlition S, a consortium of national and charitable research funders including UKRI, Wellcome and members of the European Research Council network. It sets three non-negotiable conditions for compliant publication, in force since the policy’s 2021 implementation date:

    • Licensing — the published article must carry a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, or an equivalent that permits free reuse, as a default condition.
    • Immediacy — there can be no embargo period; the Version of Record, or an accepted manuscript carrying the same licence, must be open at the moment of publication.
    • Rights retention — authors, not publishers, must retain the rights needed to comply, formalised in cOAlition S’s Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), which lets funded authors apply a CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript regardless of the publisher’s own copyright terms.

    cOAlition S also phased out support for hybrid and transformative-journal routes: funding for APCs in hybrid subscription journals was withdrawn after 2024, meaning publishers relying on transformative agreements needed to complete a full flip to open access to remain straightforwardly fundable under Plan S.

    Does ACM Open satisfy cOAlition S requirements?

    Measured against each Plan S condition, ACM’s current model clears the bar directly rather than through a transitional workaround. The table below maps ACM’s terms to the three cOAlition S requirements.

    Plan S requirement ACM Open / ACM Digital Library position
    CC BY licence by default CC BY is the default licence under ACM Open; authors may select an alternative Creative Commons licence such as CC BY-NC-ND where a funder permits it.
    No embargo (immediacy) Zero embargo — the Version of Record is openly accessible in the ACM Digital Library at the point of publication for every ACM title.
    Author/institution rights retention ACM ceased requiring copyright transfer from authors; authors grant ACM a non-exclusive licence to publish rather than assigning copyright, satisfying the Rights Retention Strategy.
    Sustainable, transparent cost model ACM Open’s Read & Publish fee is fixed for the agreement term and based on three-year historical output, giving institutions a predictable APC-equivalent cost.

    The practical effect for a cOAlition S-funded computer scientist is that publishing in an ACM venue no longer requires checking whether a specific journal is “transformative” or tracking an embargo clock — the open-access, CC BY, zero-embargo position now applies uniformly across the ACM catalogue.

    What happened to ACM’s transformative agreements?

    Before the January 2026 flip, ACM Open operated as a transformative agreement: a Read & Publish deal under which subscription revenue was gradually redirected toward open-access publishing, with the expectation that the journal portfolio would eventually convert fully to open access. UK higher-education institutions negotiated ACM Open terms through Jisc, whose subscriptions catalogue still lists the prior “ACM OPEN Journals 2023-2025” agreement as the precursor arrangement that libraries used to budget for the transition.

    ACM’s own SIGGRAPH leadership signalled the scale of this shift well in advance: in a June 2024 community Q&A, ACM SIGGRAPH chair Jonathan Aldrich stated that ACM anticipated 60-65% or more of authors would already be covered by institutional open-access agreements by the time of the full transition, with the remainder needing an author-paid or waiver route. That anticipated coverage gap is precisely what the January 2026 full flip was designed to close, since every article — not just those from ACM Open institutions — is now open access regardless of the author’s institutional agreement status.

    What this means for institutions and researchers

    For research administrators tracking funder compliance, ACM’s flip removes a recurring due-diligence step: computer-science output published with ACM no longer needs an individual title-by-title check against a cOAlition S-approved transformative journal list, because the requirement is now met at the publisher level. Institutions still weighing whether to join ACM Open should note that the Read & Publish fee is separate from open-access compliance itself — declining to subscribe does not make an ACM article closed, but it may shift APC liability onto individual authors or their grants.

    For authors publishing under UKRI, Horizon Europe or other cOAlition S-aligned funder mandates, the practical takeaway is that ACM venues can now be selected on scholarly merit without a separate compliance audit — a meaningful simplification for research administrators supporting authors across computing, information systems and related interdisciplinary fields.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is ACM open access?

    ACM open access refers to ACM’s publishing model, under which, as of January 2026, all ACM journals, conference proceedings and magazines are freely accessible with no reader-side subscription barrier. Authors retain copyright and publish under a CC BY licence by default, typically funded through their institution’s ACM Open Read & Publish agreement rather than a per-article fee.

    Is ACM open access free for readers?

    Yes. The ACM Digital Library’s Basic edition gives free, open-access reading of ACM’s full published corpus. A separate paid Premium edition exists, but it adds discovery and analytics tools rather than gating access to the research articles themselves.

    Does ACM’s open-access model satisfy Plan S?

    Yes. ACM’s default CC BY licence, zero-embargo release of the Version of Record, and author rights retention policy together meet all three of cOAlition S’s core Plan S conditions, without relying on a transformative-agreement exception.

    What licence does ACM Open use?

    ACM Open’s default licence is CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution), which permits free reuse with attribution and satisfies cOAlition S’s licensing requirement. Authors may request an alternative Creative Commons licence, such as CC BY-NC-ND, where their funder’s terms allow it.

    Looking ahead

    ACM’s move puts one of computing’s two dominant scholarly publishers — alongside IEEE, which retains a hybrid subscription model for most titles — fully inside the Plan S compliance perimeter without caveats. For funders and institutions monitoring discipline-specific open-access uptake, ACM’s flip is a useful signal that field-specific societies can complete a full transition to open access while keeping a Read & Publish fee structure recognisable to library budgets. Research administrators supporting computer-science authors should update internal compliance checklists to reflect that ACM no longer requires case-by-case verification against transformative-journal criteria.

  • Rights Retention Strategy: Authors Keep Rights

    The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) is the cOAlition S mechanism that lets an author apply a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) — the peer-reviewed, pre-typeset version of a paper — before any publisher copyright agreement is signed. Because the licence exists first, no later publishing contract can strip the author of the right to deposit and reuse that manuscript. It is not itself a route to open access; it is a rights-based safeguard that makes the Green route enforceable even when a publisher’s terms would otherwise block it.

    In one sentence: the Rights Retention Strategy is a funder-attached licensing condition, applied at the point of grant award, requiring a CC BY licence on the AAM so that no subsequent publisher agreement can override the author’s right to share it openly.

    What Is the Rights Retention Strategy?

    cOAlition S developed the Rights Retention Strategy and announced it on 15 July 2020, designed to ensure that scholarly publications arising from funded research could be made open access regardless of a publisher’s self-archiving embargo. Under the RRS, a cOAlition S funder’s grant conditions require that a CC BY licence is applied to the AAM before submission to a journal — the licence is a condition of the funding, not a request made to the publisher.

    Authors signal this by adding a rights retention statement to the manuscript’s acknowledgements section and cover letter at submission, typically worded along the lines of: “For the purposes of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.” This statement puts the publisher on notice before any copyright transfer agreement (CTA) is discussed, which is the legal mechanism that prevents a later CTA from overriding it.

    How Does Rights Retention Differ from Green and Gold Open Access?

    Green OA is a route: an author deposits a manuscript in a repository, often after an embargo the publisher sets. Gold OA is also a route: the publisher makes the version of record open immediately, usually funded by an article processing charge (APC). The Rights Retention Strategy is neither route on its own — it is a rights mechanism that removes the publisher’s ability to impose an embargo or demand exclusive rights over the AAM, which in practice enables no-embargo Green OA without requiring an APC.

    Mechanism When rights are secured Licence applied Embargo Typical cost to author
    Rights Retention Strategy At grant award, before submission CC BY on the AAM None None
    Green OA (standard) At deposit, after publication Publisher-defined, often more restrictive Often 6–24 months None
    Gold OA At publication Usually CC BY on the version of record None Article processing charge

    The practical distinction matters for compliance: an author can satisfy a funder’s immediate-CC-BY requirement through Rights Retention without paying an APC, which is why cOAlition S built the strategy — to decouple open access compliance from publisher paywalls and Gold OA pricing.

    What Do UKRI, cOAlition S and REF Require of Authors?

    UKRI’s open access policy, in effect from 1 April 2022, requires that in-scope peer-reviewed research articles be made immediately open access on publication, via the version of record or the AAM under a CC BY licence, with no embargo permitted. Rights Retention is the mechanism many UK institutions use to guarantee this for the AAM route when a journal will not offer immediate Gold OA on acceptable terms.

    Several UK universities embedded Rights Retention into institutional policy well ahead of REF deadlines: the University of Edinburgh introduced it in April 2022, the University of Cambridge in May 2022, and the University of St Andrews in December 2022, with the N8 Research Partnership universities committing to similar statements. King’s College London instituted its Rights Retention Strategy through a revised Research Publications Policy effective 1 March 2023, explicitly framed around meeting both funder and future REF eligibility requirements. Institutional rights retention is not a new idea — Harvard University adopted the first version of this approach in 2008, more than a decade before Plan S formalised it for European and UK funders.

    • Check whether your funder is a cOAlition S signatory or a UKRI council with an equivalent CC BY mandate.
    • Add the rights retention statement to your manuscript’s acknowledgements and cover letter at submission, not after acceptance.
    • Deposit the AAM in your institutional repository on acceptance, without waiting for an embargo to expire.
    • Keep a record of the statement and deposit date for REF output-eligibility evidence.

    Authors publishing multi-author, multi-funder papers should note that the corresponding author typically applies the statement on behalf of all co-authors when negotiating with the journal — clear, attributed authorship records make this easier to evidence, which is why institutions increasingly pair rights retention guidance with structured authorship documentation.

    Common Questions About Rights Retention

    What is the Rights Retention Strategy?

    The Rights Retention Strategy is cOAlition S’s mechanism requiring a CC BY licence on the Author Accepted Manuscript, applied as a funder grant condition before journal submission. It guarantees immediate, embargo-free open access to the peer-reviewed manuscript without requiring an article processing charge or publisher permission.

    What does it mean to retain rights under Plan S?

    Retaining rights means the author keeps sufficient non-exclusive rights over the AAM to deposit, share and licence it for reuse, even after signing a publisher’s copyright transfer agreement. The CC BY licence takes legal precedence because it was applied before that agreement existed.

    What is the Rights Retention Strategy statement wording?

    Institutions use variants of a standard sentence: the author has applied a CC BY licence to the AAM “for the purposes of open access,” included in the submission cover letter and manuscript acknowledgements. Several UK universities, including Edinburgh, publish translated versions of this exact statement for international co-authors.

    How do authors notify a publisher under the Rights Retention Strategy?

    Authors notify publishers by inserting the rights retention statement into the manuscript submission itself — typically the cover letter and acknowledgements — rather than negotiating separately. This creates a documented, timestamped notice that the CC BY licence predates any subsequent copyright transfer agreement.

    What This Means for Institutions and the Next REF

    For research administrators, Rights Retention converts open access compliance from a publisher-dependent negotiation into an institution-controlled process: the licence is secured at the point of funding, not the point of publication, so compliance no longer hinges on which journal an author chooses. This matters directly for REF output eligibility, where a documented deposit and licence trail is the evidence assessors and funders will check.

    Some publishers have pushed back against Rights Retention Strategy statements, occasionally asking authors to remove them or delaying decisions, though institutions with published policies — from Harvard onward — report continued publication success across their author base. As more UK institutions and cOAlition S funders align on CC BY-by-default AAM licensing, expect the strategy to become the default compliance route wherever Gold OA APCs are unaffordable or unavailable, with research administrators increasingly tracking deposit and licence records through structured research administration systems rather than manual follow-up.

  • bioRxiv License Update: What Changed for Authors and Reuse

    bioRxiv’s licence update, live via the platform’s Author Area since January 2026, lets authors request a change to a less-restrictive Creative Commons licence on a preprint already posted — without submitting a new version. The change can only move in one direction, towards more permissive reuse, and it exists chiefly to help authors bring older preprints into line with funder mandates that require CC BY.

    bioRxiv is a free preprint server for the life sciences, operated by the non-profit organisation openRxiv, which also runs the companion server medRxiv for health-sciences preprints.

    Contents

    What is the bioRxiv licence update, and why was it introduced?

    The bioRxiv licence update is a self-service feature that lets a preprint’s corresponding or submitting author switch its Creative Commons licence to a less restrictive option after posting, without triggering a full revision. openRxiv documented the mechanics in a step-by-step guide published on 7 January 2026, and followed up with a policy explainer on 20 May 2026 setting out the rationale.

    The trigger is compliance drift. Openrxiv’s own explainer states that a growing number of funders “require their grantees to apply specific licenses to their preprints, typically CC BY,” but that “many authors are unaware of this” and post under a more restrictive option by default. Before this update, the only remedy was submitting an entirely new version of the preprint and re-selecting a licence — a heavier process that also generates a fresh revision record. This is distinct from an earlier, smaller change in January 2025, when bioRxiv and medRxiv reordered their licence-selection menus to place CC BY at the top of the list; the 2026 update is the first mechanism that lets authors retroactively fix the licence on preprints they have already posted.

    How do authors request a licence change?

    The workflow runs entirely through the bioRxiv submission system’s Author Area and does not require re-uploading a manuscript. It applies only to the most recent version of a preprint, and only to preprints posted within the past two years.

    • Log into the Author Area from the bioRxiv submit page.
    • Locate the “Request License Update” box on the right-hand side of the page.
    • Select “Update license choice on previously posted papers.”
    • Choose the eligible preprint by its manuscript ID (only papers where the requester was corresponding or submitting author are listed).
    • Select a new, less restrictive licence and submit the request; a confirmation email follows.

    Two constraints apply strictly. First, the feature is unavailable if an incomplete revision is already in the submission system, or if a previous licence request is still pending. Second, a request can even be made after the preprint has been formally published in a journal, since the licence sits on the preprint record independently of the journal’s own copyright terms.

    Licence options compared: what actually changed

    bioRxiv preprints have long offered a choice of Creative Commons licences plus a “no licence” (all rights reserved) default, and a CC0 public-domain option for US federal employees such as NIH intramural researchers. What changed in 2026 is not the menu of options — it is that authors can now move an already-posted preprint from a more restrictive option to a less restrictive one after the fact.

    Licence Commercial reuse Attribution required Text-and-data mining / AI training Typical funder fit
    CC BY Permitted Yes Unrestricted, including commercial use HHMI, Gates Foundation, most cOAlition S funders
    CC BY-ND Permitted (no derivatives) Yes Mining permitted; no adapted/derivative outputs distributed Rarely funder-compliant
    CC BY-NC Not permitted Yes Restricted to non-commercial use Non-compliant with CC BY mandates
    CC BY-NC-ND Not permitted Yes Most restrictive; non-commercial, no derivatives Rarely funder-compliant
    CC0 Permitted (public domain) No Unrestricted US federal/NIH intramural authors only
    No licence selected Not permitted without separate permission N/A Reuse requires author permission Non-compliant with most funder mandates

    Because Creative Commons licences are irrevocable once attached to a public copy of a work, the update only runs in the permissive direction. An author can move from CC BY-NC to CC BY; the system rejects a request to move from CC BY to a more restrictive licence, since existing downloaded and archived copies would remain under the original, broader terms regardless.

    What this means for CC-BY reuse, text-and-data mining, and AI training

    bioRxiv’s baseline terms of use already permit text-and-data mining of posted content, which is the legal hook that has made preprint corpora attractive training data for machine-learning systems. The licence attached to an individual preprint then determines the scope of onward reuse beyond that baseline — and this is where the 2026 update has practical bite.

    Under CC BY, any party — including a commercial AI developer — may reproduce, adapt, and redistribute the work, provided the original authors are credited. Under CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-ND, commercial reuse (which covers most AI model training conducted by for-profit developers) is not licensed, regardless of the platform-level text-mining consent. That gap is precisely what several funders have moved to close: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s preprint requirement, effective 1 January 2026, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s preprint mandate, in force since 1 January 2025, both require grantee preprints to carry CC BY. The licence-update feature exists to let authors already out of step with those mandates fix a specific preprint without a full resubmission.

    For institutions and research-integrity offices, the practical implication is that a preprint’s licence — not merely its posting on an open server — is the operative variable for downstream reuse and AI-training permissions. Auditing grantee preprints for licence compliance, not just for the fact of preprint deposit, is now a distinct compliance step.

    Answer-first Q&A

    How do I update a bioRxiv?

    Authors can request a licence update from the Author Area of the bioRxiv submission system, using the “Request License Update” box, without submitting a full revision. The change applies only to preprints posted in the past two years and only to the most recent version, moving to a less restrictive licence.

    What are the licence options for bioRxiv?

    bioRxiv authors can choose CC BY, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-ND, or leave the preprint with no licence (all rights reserved). A CC0 public-domain option is also available specifically for US federal employees, such as NIH intramural researchers.

    Does bioRxiv count as published?

    No. A bioRxiv preprint is not peer reviewed and does not constitute formal journal publication; it is a publicly posted manuscript with its own DOI. Authors remain free to submit the same work to a journal afterward, and the preprint record persists independently of that later publication.

    Who maintains bioRxiv?

    bioRxiv is operated by openRxiv, a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing science communication, which also runs the companion health-sciences server medRxiv. openRxiv is supported by institutions including Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Sergey Brin Family Foundation.

    Implications for institutions, funders, and authors

    Research-administration offices tracking open-access compliance should treat the licence update as a remediation tool, not a substitute for correct licence selection at submission. It closes a specific gap — preprints posted before an author understood their funder’s CC BY requirement — but it does not apply to preprints older than two years, to superseded versions, or where a revision is already mid-process.

    For anyone advising authors on authorship rights and responsibilities, the clearest guidance is to check funder licensing terms before first posting, since fixing a mismatched licence later depends on the preprint still being within the two-year eligibility window. Related open-research terminology, including licensing and reuse definitions, is tracked in the CASRAI open-research dictionary.

    Expect other preprint servers to face similar pressure as CC BY mandates spread across research funders. The direction of travel — author-initiated, platform-mediated licence correction rather than manuscript resubmission — is a practical template other repositories are likely to adopt as funder compliance checks tighten.

  • Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy vs Plan S and REF Requirements

    The Wellcome Trust open access policy requires immediate, embargo-free deposit of Wellcome-funded research articles in Europe PMC under a CC BY licence, restricts article-processing-charge funding to fully open-access venues from January 2025, and layers a separate data-sharing mandate on top of its OA rules — diverging in mechanics from both Plan S’s route-based minimum and REF 2029’s embargo-tolerant, lower-bar licensing floor.

    Wellcome is a UK-based biomedical research charity and a founding funder of cOAlition S, the international funder consortium that created Plan S in 2018.

    What does Wellcome’s open access policy require in 2026?

    Wellcome’s policy, in force since 1 January 2021 and tightened twice since, applies to all original research articles arising in whole or part from its funding. Three mechanics define it. First, the article must be deposited in Europe PMC and made freely available on the official publication date, with no embargo permitted. Second, authors must retain enough rights to apply a CC BY licence to the Author Accepted Manuscript — a mechanism known as rights retention — with CC BY-ND granted only by exception. Third, from 1 January 2025 Wellcome funds article-processing charges only in fully open-access journals or platforms; transitional funding for hybrid “read and publish” agreements ended in December 2024.

    A 16 January 2024 update added a fourth route: where neither the Version of Record nor the Accepted Manuscript can be made compliant, a CC BY-licensed preprint posted to a Europe PMC-indexed server before final publication now satisfies the policy. Scholarly monographs and book chapters submitted after 1 January 2021 fall under a related but separate Wellcome monograph policy, which permits a maximum six-month embargo — a materially different rule from the zero-embargo standard applied to journal articles.

    How Wellcome aligns with — and adds to — Plan S

    Wellcome has been a cOAlition S founding member since 2018, and its journal-article rules track Plan S’s core requirements closely: immediate access, a CC BY default, and no embargo. Both frameworks recognise the same three compliance routes — publishing in a fully open-access venue, self-archiving via rights retention in a repository, or publishing through a transformative agreement — and both use the shared Journal Checker Tool to let authors verify a venue in advance.

    Wellcome goes beyond the Plan S baseline in enforcement and scope. Plan S sets principles each signatory funder operationalises independently; Wellcome adds funder-specific detail Plan S does not itself mandate — the 2024 preprint route, a ban on OA block-grant funds paying hybrid APCs, and named sanctions (loss of lead-applicant eligibility, suspended grant payments) for non-compliance. Plan S does not prescribe monograph rules; Wellcome does, via its separate six-month-embargo monograph policy.

    Where Wellcome diverges from REF 2029’s open access rules

    REF 2029 — the UK’s national research assessment exercise, run by Research England and the other UK funding bodies — is not a Plan S signatory framework, and its open access requirements are structurally looser than Wellcome’s. Under the REF 2029 policy for outputs published between 1 January 2026 and 31 December 2028, journal articles and conference proceedings must be deposited within three months of publication, but embargoes are still permitted: up to six months for Main Panels A and B, and up to twelve months for Main Panels C and D. That is a reduction from REF 2021’s 12- and 24-month allowances, but it is not the zero-embargo standard Wellcome and Plan S apply.

    REF 2029’s licensing floor is also lower. While CC BY is the funding bodies’ stated preference, a CC BY-NC-ND licence — Non-Commercial, No Derivatives — meets the minimum requirement, versus Wellcome’s CC BY default with only narrow CC BY-ND exceptions. REF 2029 additionally excludes monographs, book chapters and scholarly editions from its open access scope entirely, whereas Wellcome applies its own (separate) embargo rule to those output types. The table below summarises the divergence.

    Requirement Wellcome (2026) Plan S / cOAlition S REF 2029
    Embargo (journal articles) None None 6 months (Panels A/B); 12 months (Panels C/D)
    Default licence CC BY (CC BY-ND by exception) CC BY CC BY preferred; CC BY-NC-ND meets minimum
    APC funding scope Fully OA venues only (from Jan 2025) Route-dependent, funder-operationalised Not an APC-funding body
    Compliance route Europe PMC deposit, rights retention, or CC BY preprint Gold OA, rights retention, or transformative agreement Repository deposit (green route) within 3 months of publication
    Monographs/book chapters In scope; max 6-month embargo Not prescribed by Plan S itself Out of scope for REF 2029
    Data sharing mandate Separate DMSP requirement Not part of core Plan S text Not part of REF open access policy

    Data sharing and rights retention: Wellcome’s additional layer

    Neither Plan S nor REF 2029 mandates data sharing as a condition of open access compliance; Wellcome does, through a policy that operates alongside — not inside — its OA rules. Wellcome’s Data, Software and Materials Management and Sharing Policy, updated 1 August 2024, requires funded researchers to submit an outputs management plan and to maximise access to research data with as few restrictions as possible. For research relating to public health emergencies, the policy requires quality-assured interim and final data to be shared as rapidly and as widely as possible, ahead of formal publication.

    • A Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMSP) is typically required at the application or award stage, not deferred to end-of-grant reporting.
    • The rights-retention statement authors must insert into subscription and hybrid-journal submissions is a Wellcome-specific compliance artefact — it is not required in the same form under REF 2029’s repository-deposit route.
    • Non-compliance with either the open access or the data-sharing policy can trigger the same sanction: ineligibility to apply as lead applicant on future Wellcome grants.

    This is the funder-specific compliance gap institutions most often miss: a paper can satisfy REF 2029’s repository-deposit rule and still fail Wellcome’s audit if the underlying dataset was not made accessible under the separate data policy.

    Frequently asked questions

    Does Wellcome allow any embargo on open access articles?

    No. Wellcome’s open access policy requires immediate deposit in Europe PMC with no embargo for original research articles. This is stricter than REF 2029, which permits six- or twelve-month embargoes depending on the assessment panel, and applies only to journal articles and conference proceedings, not to monographs.

    Is Wellcome Trust a Plan S funder?

    Yes. Wellcome has been a founding member of cOAlition S since 2018 and its 2021 policy was designed to align with Plan S principles. However, Wellcome operationalises those principles through its own mechanics — including a 2024 preprint-compliance route and named non-compliance sanctions — that Plan S itself does not mandate.

    Do REF 2029 open access rules apply to monographs?

    No. REF 2029’s open access policy covers only journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN; monographs, book chapters and scholarly editions are excluded from the current cycle, though UK funding bodies have signalled monograph requirements from the following REF exercise.

    Will Wellcome pay for open access publication in a hybrid journal?

    Not from January 2025 onward. Wellcome’s OA block grant now funds article-processing charges only in fully open-access journals or platforms; the transitional funding for hybrid “read and publish” agreements ended in December 2024.

    Implications for institutions and researchers

    Research administration teams managing multi-funder portfolios cannot apply one embargo or licensing rule across Wellcome, Plan S-aligned funders and REF 2029 — the three frameworks set genuinely different floors. A paper compliant with REF 2029’s CC BY-NC-ND minimum via green deposit can still breach Wellcome’s zero-embargo, CC BY-default rule if Wellcome funding is also acknowledged. Institutions need compliance checklists that track funder-specific mechanics, not a generic “open access” requirement, and should route Wellcome-funded outputs through the Journal Checker Tool before submission rather than after acceptance.

    The direction of travel across all three frameworks is convergence on stricter terms: REF’s embargo ceilings have already fallen once, UK funding bodies have flagged monograph open access for the exercise after REF 2029, and Wellcome’s data-sharing layer signals that funders increasingly treat open access and open data as linked obligations, not separate ones. Compliance processes built around funder-specific detail, not the lowest common denominator, will hold up best as these policies keep tightening.

  • What the cOAlition S 2026-2030 Strategy Means for Your Institution’s Open Access Policy

    In November 2025, cOAlition S — the funder alliance behind Plan S — published its strategic direction for 2026 to 2030, and the cOAlition S strategy 2026 document marks the most significant recalibration of the coalition’s open access policy since Plan S launched in 2018. For research offices, the headline is not that open access requirements are loosening. It is that the coalition is walking away from the transformative agreements it once tolerated as a bridge to full open access, while redirecting funder investment toward diamond open access and reaffirming, unchanged, its core mandate for immediate open access under a CC BY licence.

    For institutions that built compliance workflows around transformative “read and publish” deals, this is not a minor administrative footnote. It changes which routes to compliance your researchers can rely on, which publisher agreements your library or research office should keep renewing, and where new funding lines for open infrastructure are likely to appear over the next four years. This explainer sets out what has actually changed, what has stayed the same, and what research administrators should be updating in internal open access policy documents now.

    cOAlition S 2026 to 2030 strategy: the end of transformative agreement support

    Transformative agreements — the large “read and publish” or “publish and read” contracts negotiated between library consortia and major publishers such as Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley — were always framed by cOAlition S as a temporary compliance route, not a destination. They allowed institutions to satisfy Plan S requirements without every researcher negotiating individual article processing charge (APC) waivers or rights-retention clauses, on the understanding that publishers would use the revenue to convert subscription journals to fully open access titles within a defined period.

    The cOAlition S 2026 to 2030 strategy confirms that this transitional support is over. Funders in the coalition will no longer treat transformative agreements as an acceptable long-term compliance mechanism, reflecting a long-standing concern, raised repeatedly since the original Plan S implementation guidance, that many transformative deals converted little content to genuine open access while entrenching APC-based publishing economics at large commercial publishers. Institutions that have relied on a transformative agreement as their primary Plan S compliance route should treat this as a signal to diversify, not a cliff-edge deadline to panic over, but the direction of travel is unambiguous: the coalition wants funded researchers publishing through routes that do not depend on subscription-linked bundled contracts.

    Expanding diamond open access investment

    The counterpart to withdrawing support from transformative agreements is an expansion of funder investment in diamond open access — journals and platforms that charge no fee to authors and no subscription fee to readers, typically run by universities, learned societies, library consortia or national research infrastructures rather than commercial publishers. This builds on work already under way through the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access and the DIAMAS project, which have mapped the diamond OA landscape across Europe and identified capacity, quality-assurance and sustainability gaps in community-owned publishing.

    For research offices, the practical implication is that the menu of “approved” publication venues under funder open access policy is likely to broaden to include more diamond OA journals and platforms, some of which may be less familiar to academic staff than established commercial titles. Research administrators should expect funders to ask institutions to help identify, vet and promote diamond OA venues in their disciplines, and to factor diamond OA into researcher guidance rather than treating APC-based gold open access as the default paid route to compliance.

    What hasn’t changed: the immediate CC BY mandate

    It would be a mistake to read the cOAlition S 2026 to 2030 strategy as a loosening of open access requirements. The core Plan S principle — that research arising from coalition-funded grants must be made immediately open access, with no embargo, under a CC BY licence (or, in defined circumstances, CC BY-ND) — remains fully in force. So does the Rights Retention Strategy, which allows authors to apply an open licence to the author accepted manuscript at the point of submission, regardless of the publisher’s own policy, precisely so that researchers are not locked into paying an APC or relying on a transformative agreement to comply.

    In other words, Plan S gold open access — publishing in a fully open journal, whether APC-funded or diamond — remains one valid compliance route, as does green open access via rights retention and immediate deposit in a repository. What the 2026 to 2030 strategy removes is institutional and publisher reliance on transformative agreements as a proxy for compliance, and what it adds is funder appetite to underwrite non-APC alternatives so that gold open access is no longer synonymous with paying a commercial publisher.

    cOAlition S members and the wider funding landscape

    cOAlition S members include UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Science Foundation Ireland, Luxembourg’s Fonds National de la Recherche, and the European Commission acting on behalf of Horizon Europe, among other national and regional funders. Because these funders between them cover a substantial share of publicly funded research across Europe, a strategic shift of this kind has effects well beyond the institutions directly funded by coalition members — publishers and platforms that want to remain viable routes to compliance for European-funded authors have to adapt their offerings accordingly, and non-coalition funders elsewhere often watch cOAlition S’s direction when reviewing their own mandates.

    Research offices supporting international, multi-funder projects should note that not every funder a researcher reports to will move at the same pace. Where a project is co-funded by a cOAlition S member and a funder with a different open access policy, the more stringent requirement typically governs compliance — so the withdrawal of transformative agreement support from coalition funders does not automatically loosen obligations under, for example, UKRI’s own open access policy or NIH data-sharing requirements, which continue to operate on their own terms.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    Institutional open access policies, researcher guidance pages and library-negotiated agreement lists were largely written on the assumption that transformative agreements were a stable, funder-endorsed compliance route. That assumption no longer holds for cOAlition S-funded research. Research offices should treat the following as near-term priorities:

    • Audit compliance messaging. Update internal guidance that lists transformative agreements as a “safe” route to Plan S compliance; reframe them as one option among several, with declining funder endorsement.
    • Reconfirm rights retention workflows. Ensure researchers and grants staff understand that applying a CC BY licence to the author accepted manuscript at submission, under the Rights Retention Strategy, remains a robust and funder-preferred compliance path that does not depend on any publisher contract.
    • Map diamond OA venues in relevant disciplines. Work with library and repository teams to identify credible diamond open access journals and platforms so researchers have a vetted list rather than discovering options ad hoc.
    • Flag co-funding conflicts early. Where projects have mixed funding sources, confirm which policy is most stringent before advising researchers on their compliance route.
    • Watch publisher responses. Expect publishers with large transformative agreement portfolios to adjust pricing, waiver schemes or their own diamond and community-publishing offerings in response to reduced funder backing — track these changes when renewing agreements.
    • Brief research leadership. Associate deans for research and heads of library services should be aware that funder-endorsed compliance routes are shifting, ahead of the next round of institutional open access policy review.

    Conclusion

    The cOAlition S strategy 2026 announcement does not soften Plan S; it sharpens the coalition’s original argument that open access should not simply reproduce commercial subscription economics under a new name. By withdrawing endorsement from transformative agreements and channelling investment toward diamond open access, cOAlition S is betting that community-owned, non-APC publishing can scale to meet demand that was previously absorbed by bundled publisher contracts. Whether that bet pays off will depend on how quickly diamond OA infrastructure can absorb volume without compromising editorial quality or long-term sustainability — a question the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access and DIAMAS project were designed to help answer.

    For research administrators, the practical task is less about reacting to a single announcement and more about maintaining policy documents that can flex as funder expectations continue to evolve through 2030. Institutions that keep rights retention workflows well understood, diamond OA options mapped, and researcher guidance current will be best placed to support compliance regardless of which route to open access their funders favour next.