CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: coalition s funders

  • cOAlition S Executive Steering Group Explained

    The cOAlition S Executive Steering Group (ESG) is the body that develops and implements Plan S strategy day to day, taking majority-vote decisions and reporting upward to the funder-led Leaders’ Group. It is chaired by Lidia Borrell-Damián, Secretary General of Science Europe, and is now working alongside Curt Rice, appointed Director in May 2026 after Johan Rooryck’s departure in July 2025.

    The coalition s executive steering group is the operational engine most people mean when they ask “who actually runs Plan S” — as distinct from the Leaders’ Group, which sets overall direction but meets far less frequently. For research administrators trying to work out who to brief, lobby, or route a query to, the distinction matters.

    cOAlition S is an informal alliance of research funders and performers that have publicly committed to implementing the open-access principles of Plan S; it holds no independent legal capacity of its own, according to its published Terms of Reference.

    What is the Executive Steering Group and who sits on it?

    The Executive Steering Group is the standing body responsible for developing cOAlition S’s strategy and overseeing its implementation across member organisations. It sits below the Leaders’ Group in the governance hierarchy but is where most of the substantive, ongoing work happens.

    According to cOAlition S’s published governance roster, current and recent ESG representatives include:

    • Lidia Borrell-Damián (Chair) — Secretary General, Science Europe
    • Zoé Ancion — ANR, French National Research Agency
    • Michael Arentoft — European Commission
    • Rachel Bruce — UKRI, UK Research and Innovation
    • Ian Coltart — World Health Organisation
    • Ashley Farley — Gates Foundation
    • Mongezi Mdhluli — South African Medical Research Council
    • Bodo Stern — HHMI, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

    Two cOAlition S Office roles — a Programme Manager and a Communications Manager — sit in the ESG in a Secretariat capacity, and Marc Schiltz, an architect of the original Plan S principles, continues as a non-voting adviser. Because national funder representatives rotate, administrators should treat any published roster as a snapshot rather than a permanent list.

    How does the ESG fit into cOAlition S’s wider governance?

    cOAlition S runs a four-layer structure: the Leaders’ Group (heads of funding and performing organisations, who approve overall strategy and budget), the Executive Steering Group (which develops and executes that strategy), an Experts Group (technical working groups), and the cOAlition S Secretariat, which is hosted by OPERAS AISBL in Brussels and provides day-to-day administrative and communications support.

    Body Role Chair / lead Decision power
    Leaders’ Group Sets overall Plan S strategy and budget Prof. Mari Sundli Tveit, Chief Executive, Research Council of Norway Highest authority; approves ESG proposals
    Executive Steering Group Develops and implements strategy; runs operations Lidia Borrell-Damián, Science Europe Majority vote; reports to Leaders’ Group
    Secretariat / Office Administrative, financial and communications support Curt Rice, Director Executes decisions; no independent vote
    Experts Group Technical and policy working groups Rotating co-chairs Advisory input to ESG

    The Secretariat’s own budget illustrates how much the operation has contracted: cOAlition S’s published accounts show total Office spending of €545,167 in 2025, down from €1,108,186 in 2024, with staffing falling from roughly 3 full-time-equivalent posts in 2024 to 2 in 2025 — consistent with reporting that cOAlition S is scaling back its ambitions and shifting focus toward funding sustainability.

    Who leads the ESG now Curt Rice has replaced Johan Rooryck?

    Prof. Johan Rooryck, cOAlition S’s Executive Director since 2019, left the role on 3 July 2025 after overseeing the coalition’s expansion to 28 research funding and performing organisations. Following his departure, the Executive Steering Group itself took on interim oversight of operations while cOAlition S undertook a strategic review.

    cOAlition S announced on 13 May 2026 that Curt Rice, former rector of Oslo Metropolitan University with more than three decades in Norwegian and international higher education, would become its new Director. Notably, the title changed from “Executive Director” to “Director” — a small but real signal of a leaner operating model. The appointment coincided with the adoption of cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 Strategy, which administrators should read as the current reference document for near-term priorities.

    Under the Terms of Reference, the Director leads the Secretariat team, reports to the Chair of the Executive Steering Group, and acts as cOAlition S’s main spokesperson — meaning press and policy enquiries typically route through this office rather than directly to individual ESG members.

    What does the ESG actually decide, and how?

    The Executive Steering Group takes decisions by majority vote among its members and reports those decisions to the Leaders’ Group. Its remit covers developing strategic input, overseeing joint programmes and funding streams, and directing cOAlition S’s public communications through the Office.

    In practice this means the ESG — not the Leaders’ Group — is where day-to-day questions about Plan S implementation, transformative journal assessments, and funder-alignment issues get resolved before reaching the funders’ principals. The Leaders’ Group retains final sign-off on strategy and budget, but rarely intervenes at the operational level.

    Answer-first Q&A

    Who are the members of the cOAlition S Executive Steering Group?

    The ESG is chaired by Lidia Borrell-Damián of Science Europe and includes representatives from funders such as UKRI, the European Commission, ANR, WHO, the Gates Foundation, HHMI, and the South African Medical Research Council, plus non-voting cOAlition S Office staff. Membership rotates as national funders change their delegates.

    What is the difference between the Leaders’ Group and the Executive Steering Group?

    The Leaders’ Group comprises heads of member organisations and approves overall Plan S strategy and budget. The Executive Steering Group develops that strategy in detail, runs day-to-day implementation, and takes majority-vote decisions, reporting upward to the Leaders’ Group rather than acting independently.

    Who is the current Director of cOAlition S?

    Curt Rice became Director on 13 May 2026, succeeding Johan Rooryck, who departed on 3 July 2025. Rice previously served as rector of Oslo Metropolitan University and leads the Secretariat team, reporting to the Chair of the Executive Steering Group.

    Does the Executive Steering Group have the final say on Plan S policy?

    No. The ESG develops strategy and takes operational decisions by majority vote, but the Leaders’ Group holds final authority over overall strategy and budget. The ESG’s role is to execute and report, not to set Plan S’s ultimate direction unilaterally.

    What this means for research administrators

    For an institution needing to raise a Plan S implementation question, engagement route should generally go through the Secretariat/Office first — now under Curt Rice’s Directorship — rather than direct outreach to individual Executive Steering Group members, who serve in a part-time, delegated capacity alongside their home-organisation roles.

    Administrators tracking funder-mandate compliance for research administration purposes should also note the contraction in cOAlition S’s own resourcing: a shrinking Secretariat budget and headcount suggests slower turnaround on ad hoc queries and a narrower work programme under the 2026–2030 Strategy than in the coalition’s 2019–2023 growth phase.

    • Route policy and compliance queries to the Secretariat/Office, not individual ESG delegates.
    • Cite the Terms of Reference and governance page directly when briefing institutional leadership — both are publicly hosted by cOAlition S.
    • Expect the 2026–2030 Strategy, not the original 2018 Plan S text, to be the live reference point for near-term commitments.

    cOAlition S’s governance has moved from a growth-and-advocacy phase under Rooryck to a leaner, sustainability-focused phase under Rice and Borrell-Damián’s ESG chairmanship. Administrators who track this shift — rather than relying on the original 2018 Plan S announcement — will have a more accurate picture of who holds real influence over open-access mandates in 2026 and beyond.

  • cOAlition S Funding 2026: Diamond OA Shift

    cOAlition S funding has shifted decisively since 31 December 2024, when the funder consortium ended financial support for transformative agreements and transformative journals. Its 2026–2030 strategy, overseen by newly appointed Director Curt Rice and new Host Secretariat OPERAS, now channels funder money toward diamond open access publishing, repository infrastructure, and community-led scholarly communication rather than publisher-negotiated read-and-publish deals.

    cOAlition S is an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations — including UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the European Commission, and the Wellcome Trust — that jointly implements Plan S, the 2018 commitment requiring immediate open access to publicly funded research.

    What Is cOAlition S and Why Does Its Funding Matter?

    cOAlition S was formed in September 2018 by a group of national and international research funders to accelerate the transition to full and immediate open access. Its members set grant conditions that publicly funded research must appear in compliant open-access journals, platforms, or repositories without embargo.

    Because member funders collectively control billions in annual research budgets, where cOAlition S chooses to direct compliance-related funding acts as a market signal for the entire scholarly publishing sector — publishers, repositories, and diamond OA platforms all reposition around it.

    Why Did cOAlition S Stop Funding Transformative Agreements?

    Transformative agreements — bundled contracts that shifted library subscription spending toward publisher open-access fees — were originally accepted by cOAlition S as a temporary bridge toward full open access. That bridge has now been formally withdrawn.

    From 31 December 2024, cOAlition S no longer financially supports transformative agreements or transformative journals. Funders instead direct their efforts to innovative, community-led open-access publishing initiatives such as the diamond model of OA, according to cOAlition S’s own implementation guidance, as reflected in university open-access policy guides including the University of Derby Library’s Plan S guidance.

    • Transformative agreements were judged to prolong hybrid open access rather than complete the transition to full OA.
    • cOAlition S’s 10 Principles, in effect since 2021, require CC BY licensing and repository-based immediate access as compliance routes that do not depend on publisher subscription bundles.
    • Funders retain rights-retention strategies and the Journal Checker Tool as the primary compliance mechanisms once transformative-agreement subsidy ends.

    Where Is cOAlition S Redirecting Its Funding in 2026?

    cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 strategy — adopted alongside the appointment of Curt Rice as Director and OPERAS as the coalition’s new Host Secretariat — reorients funder effort toward digital publishing infrastructure and community-owned models rather than publisher-negotiated deals.

    Two developments anchor this redirection. First, the Bengaluru Roadmap and Action Plan on Diamond Open Access, the outcome document of the 3rd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access held in Bengaluru, India, sets out coordinated funder and infrastructure commitments to diamond OA at global scale. Second, cOAlition S’s own Plan S Annual Review 2025 documents the consortium’s compliance monitoring and priority-action progress as it winds down transformative-agreement support.

    Funding mechanism cOAlition S status Effective date
    Transformative agreements / transformative journals Financial support ended 31 December 2024
    Diamond open access journals and platforms Priority investment area 2026–2030 strategy
    Institutional and subject repositories Core compliance route (immediate deposit, no embargo) Ongoing since 2021
    Rights retention / CC BY licensing Required compliance mechanism Ongoing since 2021

    What Role Do Diamond Open Access and Repositories Play?

    Diamond open access is a publishing model in which neither authors nor readers pay fees, with costs instead covered by funders, institutions, or consortia — distinguishing it from the article-processing-charge model that underpins most transformative agreements.

    Repositories remain the other pillar of cOAlition S’s redirected funding: Plan S has, since 2021, treated immediate deposit in open-access repositories as a fully compliant route in its own right, independent of any publisher agreement. As transformative-agreement subsidy disappears, funders are directing new investment toward the shared infrastructure — hosting, discovery, preservation — that diamond OA platforms and repositories both depend on.

    Answer-First Questions on cOAlition S Funding

    What is Plan S?

    Plan S is an open-access publishing mandate launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, requiring that publications from publicly funded research be published immediately in compliant open-access journals, platforms, or repositories. It has applied to funded research outputs since 1 January 2021.

    Who are the cOAlition S funders?

    cOAlition S funders are an international consortium of national and supranational research funding and performing organisations, including UKRI, the European Commission, and the Wellcome Trust. Membership is open to funders willing to adopt the coalition’s ten Plan S principles and reporting requirements.

    What is diamond open access?

    Diamond open access is a scholarly publishing model where neither authors nor readers pay to publish or read, with operating costs met instead by funders, universities, or library consortia. cOAlition S now names diamond OA a priority destination for redirected funding.

    Why did cOAlition S stop funding transformative agreements?

    cOAlition S judged that transformative agreements risked entrenching hybrid open access rather than completing the shift to full OA. Support ended on 31 December 2024, with funding redirected to community-led, non-APC publishing models instead.

    What Does This Mean for Institutions and Publishers?

    Research offices and libraries that built compliance workflows around transformative-agreement read-and-publish deals now need parallel routes: repository deposit tracking, rights-retention templates, and diamond OA discovery for their researchers’ target venues.

    Publishers reliant on transformative-agreement revenue face a shrinking subsidy pool and should expect continued funder pressure toward CC BY licensing and embargo-free repository deposit as the default compliance path. Institutional research-administration teams should treat this as a funder-policy planning item, not a publishing-office footnote, when reviewing grant terms and reporting obligations. Understanding these shifts in context sits alongside broader research administration practice, and definitions of related terms are collected in the CASRAI research administration dictionary.

    Looking ahead, the 2026–2030 strategy signals that cOAlition S funding decisions will increasingly be judged on infrastructure outcomes — repository capacity, diamond OA sustainability, and equitable access — rather than publisher-agreement coverage, a shift research offices should build into multi-year OA budget planning now rather than after the next Plan S annual review.

  • cOAlition S Members in 2026: Which Funders Still Mandate Immediate Open Access

    cOAlition S is a coalition of 28 national research funders, charitable foundations, and international agencies that endorse Plan S, the requirement that publications from funded research be made openly accessible without embargo. Not every one of those coalition s members still enforces that requirement in the same way. Some, like UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Wellcome Trust, still apply the Rights Retention Strategy to force immediate access regardless of publisher policy. Others — most visibly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — have adopted 2024-era policies that no longer mandate an openly accessible accepted manuscript, and the coalition itself formally broadened its accepted routes to compliance under its 2026-2030 strategy, published 12 November 2025.

    cOAlition S is an informal alliance of research funders and research-performing organisations, launched in September 2018, that coordinates funding conditions requiring full and immediate open access to the peer-reviewed publications it supports. This article gives the current 2026 roster, distinguishes funders that still hold a full immediate-OA mandate from those that have relaxed enforcement, and explains what changed under the coalition’s newest strategic phase.

    Contents

    Who are the current cOAlition S members?

    cOAlition S began in 2018 with twelve founding organisations. According to the coalition’s own Strategy 2026-2030 document, that founding group “has developed into a robust network of 28 funders, encompassing agencies from Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa, and Australia.” The European Research Council (ERC) engaged at launch but formally withdrew support in July 2020.

    Founding and long-standing members include UKRI and Wellcome Trust (UK), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Science Foundation Ireland, Luxembourg’s Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR), Poland’s National Science Centre (NCN), Portugal’s Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), the Research Council of Norway, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, the South African Medical Research Council, Jordan’s Higher Council for Science and Technology, Zambia’s National Science and Technology Council, and US philanthropic funders including the Gates Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Templeton World Charity Foundation.

    Which funders still hold a full immediate open-access mandate?

    A small group of cOAlition S members still enforces the original, strict version of Plan S: immediate open access with no embargo, secured through the Rights Retention Strategy, which requires grantees to apply a CC BY licence to the author accepted manuscript regardless of what the publisher’s own copyright policy says.

    • UKRI requires a CC BY-licensed accepted manuscript deposited with no embargo (or a compliant gold route), enforced through its funding assurance processes.
    • Wellcome Trust applies its own Rights Retention Statement, requiring immediate open access on acceptance.
    • National European funders such as FWF, ANR, NWO, and SNSF have kept their domestic OA policies aligned with the coalition’s founding principles.

    The coalition’s commissioned review, Galvanising the open access community: A study on the impact of Plan S (2024), credits the Rights Retention Strategy as the mechanism with the most “game-changing effect,” since institutions have since adopted it independently, beyond the original funder mandate.

    Which members have relaxed enforcement?

    The clearest case of a member funder relaxing its own mandate is the Gates Foundation. In 2024 it announced a “preprint-centric” open access policy and confirmed it would stop paying article processing charges (APCs). Per Wikipedia’s sourced summary of the change, this policy is “not entirely in line with cOAlition S,” because it no longer requires that an accepted manuscript itself be made openly accessible — it instead relies on preprint deposit, which is a materially weaker guarantee than the coalition’s founding immediate-OA principle.

    Two organisations exited or declined the coalition outright rather than relaxing in place:

    • Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden) was a member in 2018 but left in 2019 over concerns about Plan S’s implementation timeline.
    • India publicly declined to join cOAlition S in October 2019, despite earlier supportive signals from its Department of Biotechnology.
    • The European Research Council withdrew its formal backing in July 2020, even though the European Commission remains engaged with the coalition’s wider work.

    Separately, cOAlition S confirmed in 2024 that it would end financial support for “transformative agreements” altogether, removing 1,589 of 2,326 journals (68%) from its transformative journals scheme in 2023. That decision tightened one enforcement lever even as the coalition’s broader 2026-2030 strategy loosened others — illustrating that “enforcement” at cOAlition S is not moving in a single direction.

    Funder-by-funder status at a glance

    Funder 2026 status Basis
    UKRI (United Kingdom) Full mandate, active Rights Retention Strategy; no-embargo CC BY requirement
    Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom) Full mandate, active Own Rights Retention Statement
    FWF, ANR, NWO, SNSF (Austria, France, Netherlands, Switzerland) Full mandate, active Domestic OA policy aligned to founding principles
    Gates Foundation (United States) Relaxed in 2024 Preprint-centric policy; APCs no longer funded; accepted manuscript OA not required
    Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden) Departed 2019 Left over Plan S implementation timeline
    European Research Council Withdrew support, 2020 Formal withdrawal in July 2020
    India (Department of Biotechnology) Never joined Declined membership, October 2019

    What changed under the 2026-2030 strategy?

    cOAlition S published its Strategy 2026-2030 on 12 November 2025, organised around three priorities: strengthening the foundations for “full, immediate, sustainable, and equitable” open access; supporting shared digital infrastructure (including a joint position on AI training uses of CC BY content); and exploring financially sustainable publishing models.

    Chemistry World’s reporting on the strategy quotes Lidia Borrell-Damián, chair of the coalition’s executive steering group and secretary general of Science Europe, describing a shift toward embracing “a range of open access models” — including publish-review-curate (PRC), diamond open access, and preprints — rather than insisting on one route. Researcher commentary quoted in the same piece characterised this as the coalition “scaling back its ambitions” from the original single 2021 target of full immediate Gold/Green access. Per the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) OA Dashboard, cited in that coverage, the global share of articles published immediately open access (gold) rose from 14% in 2014 to 40% in 2024, while subscription-only publication fell from 70% to 54% over the same decade.

    The coalition also changed its own governance in this period. In December 2025 it issued a tender for a new host secretariat, backed by an annual budget of roughly €0.8 million, after the European Science Foundation’s hosting arrangement wound down. Curt Rice — previously rector of two Norwegian universities — was appointed cOAlition S’s new director in May 2026, with Operas confirmed as the new host secretariat managing the coalition’s funds and communications.

    What does this mean for institutions and researchers?

    Research administrators advising authors funded by a cOAlition S member should not assume uniform enforcement across the roster. UKRI- and Wellcome-funded authors still face a hard Rights Retention requirement with no embargo tolerance. Gates Foundation-funded authors now face a materially different, preprint-centric expectation. The coalition’s collective policy language has shifted from “full and immediate” as the only route toward a “multitude of routes to open access” — compliance officers should check each funder’s own published policy rather than treating the cOAlition S label as a proxy for one uniform rule.

    For research administration teams tracking funder compliance, and for anyone verifying open access terminology in the CASRAI dictionary, the practical takeaway is that “cOAlition S member” is now a looser designation of shared principle rather than a guarantee of identical mandate terms.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What is cOAlition S?

    cOAlition S is an alliance of national research funders, charitable foundations, and international agencies, launched in September 2018, that coordinates Plan S — the requirement that publications from the research they fund be made openly accessible without embargo, typically via the Rights Retention Strategy.

    How many funders are in cOAlition S in 2026?

    cOAlition S counts 28 member funders as of its 2026-2030 strategy, spanning Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa, and Australia, up from the twelve founding organisations that launched Plan S in 2018.

    Have any funders left cOAlition S?

    Yes. Riksbankens Jubileumsfond left in 2019 over Plan S’s timeline, India declined to join in 2019, and the European Research Council withdrew formal support in July 2020, though the European Commission remains engaged.

    Is Plan S still mandatory for cOAlition S members in 2026?

    Core members such as UKRI and Wellcome Trust still enforce immediate open access with no embargo, but the coalition’s 2026-2030 strategy formally recognises additional routes — preprints, diamond open access, and publish-review-curate models — alongside the original mandate, rather than treating “full and immediate” as the only compliant route.

    Looking ahead

    With Curt Rice now leading the coalition and Operas installed as host secretariat, cOAlition S enters 2026-2027 — the first phase of its new strategy — with a wider tent of acceptable open access routes than it had in 2018. The roster of 28 funders remains largely intact, but “cOAlition S member” increasingly describes a shared aspiration rather than one uniform compliance rule. Institutions should track each funder’s own published policy directly rather than inferring mandate strength from coalition membership alone.

  • India Plan S Open Access: Why It Opted Out of cOAlition S

    India never signed cOAlition S’s Plan S open access mandate. Instead of committing its funders to author-pays gold open access, India built two parallel instruments: the UGC-CARE journal-quality framework (2018) and the centrally negotiated One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) scheme (live since January 2025) — a divergence that leaves authors publishing across India and Plan S jurisdictions navigating two incompatible compliance regimes.

    Plan S is a funder mandate, launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, requiring that research funded by its signatory agencies be made immediately open access on publication, either via a compliant open access journal/platform or a no-embargo repository deposit. India’s Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research were courted as potential signatories in 2019 — and none joined.

    Table of Contents

    What is Plan S, and who are cOAlition S’s funders?

    Plan S requires grantees of its backing funders to publish immediately open access, with no embargo, either through a compliant journal or platform or via deposit in an open repository. The original compliance deadline of 1 January 2020 was pushed back to 1 January 2021 after publisher and researcher pushback.

    cOAlition S has grown from twelve founding European funders in 2018 to a network of 28 funders spanning Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa and Australia. The European Commission is among them, and Horizon Europe grant conditions are aligned with Plan S principles. Notably absent: any major national research funder from India, China, or the United States federal system — a gap that limits Plan S’s claim to be a global standard rather than a European-anchored one.

    Researchers checking which funders carry a formal open access mandate — inside or outside cOAlition S — typically cross-reference the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP), maintained by the University of Southampton, which logs institutional and funder policies worldwide, including those that predate or sit outside Plan S entirely.

    Why did India decline to sign Plan S?

    India’s then Principal Scientific Adviser, K. VijayRaghavan, confirmed in October 2019 that India would not join cOAlition S, reversing earlier signals of interest. The decision rested on three concerns documented in Indian open access scholarship, notably Madhan et al.’s 2019 analysis “Open access developments in India and why India skipped Plan S”:

    • Author-pays cost exposure. Plan S’s default gold-OA route relies on APCs, which policymakers judged would shift cost onto a far larger, more resource-constrained author base than in signatory countries.
    • Publisher concentration risk. Flipping subscription journals to APC-funded gold OA was seen as likely to entrench, not weaken, large commercial publishers’ pricing power — the opposite of Plan S’s stated goal.
    • Domestic infrastructure preference. India already had a head start on public open repositories and chose to strengthen those alongside new national licensing, rather than import a mandate built for a different publishing economy.

    This was a deliberate policy choice, not neglect — India kept engaging with open access on its own terms, culminating years later in convening a major international summit on its own soil.

    India’s alternative: UGC-CARE and One Nation One Subscription

    In place of a Plan S-style mandate, India built two separate instruments that address different problems in the same publishing ecosystem — one aimed at journal quality, the other at nationwide access.

    UGC-CARE: a quality gate, not an access mandate

    The University Grants Commission’s Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics (UGC-CARE) was established in 2018 to maintain a “Reference List of Quality Journals,” curbing predatory publishing and anchoring promotion and funding decisions to vetted venues. It was never an open access policy — it never required immediate OA. The UGC itself discontinued the static list, confirming the decision at its 584th Commission meeting on 3 October 2024 and issuing a public notice in July 2025, replacing it with a 36-parameter, 8-criteria evaluation framework.

    One Nation One Subscription: access without an APC mandate

    ONOS takes the opposite approach to Plan S: instead of mandating author-side gold OA, the Government of India centrally negotiates nationwide “read” licences. The Union Cabinet approved ONOS as a Central Sector Scheme on 25 November 2024, with a ₹6,000 crore budget for 2025–2027, going live on 1 January 2025 under INFLIBNET Centre (UGC). It now covers more than 13,000 journals from 30 publishers — including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley — for roughly 6,400 institutions and 1.8 crore users, plus a dedicated ₹150 crore-per-year APC support fund.

    Framework Core model Scope Key dates
    Plan S / cOAlition S Funder mandate: immediate gold OA (often APC-funded) or no-embargo repository deposit 28 funders, mostly Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa, Australia Launched Sept 2018; compliance from Jan 2021
    UGC-CARE list Curated journal-quality reference list for career and funding recognition All UGC-recognised Indian higher education institutions Established 2018; discontinued Oct 2024 / July 2025
    One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) Centrally negotiated national read licences plus a separate APC fund ~6,400 institutions, ~1.8 crore users, 13,000+ journals, 30 publishers Approved Nov 2024; live from Jan 2025

    What the fragmentation means for the Global South

    India’s path is not isolation from the open access movement — it is parallel infrastructure-building. The clearest evidence came in February 2026, when the 3rd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access was held in Bengaluru, substantially convened by Indian research institutions and science academies. The summit produced the Bengaluru Roadmap and Action Plan on Diamond Open Access, spanning six priority areas: embedding Diamond OA in national policy, redirecting publishing spend toward community-governed infrastructure, reforming research evaluation, strengthening technical standards, recognising publishing labour, and protecting linguistic diversity.

    That summit built on earlier editions in Toluca, Mexico (2023) and Cape Town, South Africa (2024) — evidence the Global South is not waiting on cOAlition S’s APC-funded model but coordinating its own no-fee, non-commercial “Diamond” open access track, independent of European funder mandates.

    Implications for authors publishing across jurisdictions

    For authors with joint funding — a Horizon Europe grant alongside an Indian institutional affiliation, for example — the two regimes do not cancel out; they stack. A Plan S-funded co-author must still satisfy the funder’s immediate-OA and licensing requirements regardless of what ONOS or UGC-CARE recognise domestically in India.

    • Check the funder mandate first: ROARMAP and the funder’s policy page determine Plan S compliance, independent of an Indian co-author’s institutional access.
    • Do not assume ONOS access satisfies a Plan S deposit requirement — ONOS is a subscription-access and APC-support scheme, not a cOAlition S-recognised compliance pathway.
    • UGC-CARE’s discontinuation means Indian institutions are moving toward locally defined, multi-parameter evaluation rather than a single reference list — expect institution-specific guidance going forward.

    Research administrators managing multi-jurisdiction grants need to track funder-level mandates and institutional recognition lists separately, since neither India nor cOAlition S recognises the other’s framework as equivalent.

    Common questions about India and Plan S

    What is Plan S in open access?

    Plan S is a funder mandate launched in 2018 by cOAlition S requiring that publications resulting from funded research be made immediately open access on publication, either through a compliant journal or platform, or via a no-embargo repository deposit, with compliance required from January 2021.

    Is India a signatory to Plan S?

    No. India has never signed Plan S. Its Principal Scientific Adviser confirmed in October 2019 that Indian funders would not join cOAlition S, citing concerns over author-pays cost exposure and publisher concentration, and India built domestic alternatives instead.

    What did India build instead of joining Plan S?

    India built UGC-CARE (2018, a journal-quality reference framework, since discontinued and replaced) and One Nation One Subscription (live from January 2025), a ₹6,000 crore centrally negotiated national licensing scheme covering over 13,000 journals.

    Looking ahead: convergence or continued divergence?

    Nothing on either side’s roadmap points to India joining cOAlition S. ONOS is a three-year scheme running through 2027, and its renewal terms — not Plan S accession — will determine India’s next move. The more consequential trend is the Diamond OA coordination behind the Bengaluru Roadmap: Global South research systems building a non-commercial, funder-independent open access track in parallel to cOAlition S, not inside it.

    For institutions managing multi-funder compliance, CASRAI’s research administration resources track how funder mandates intersect with institutional reporting obligations, and the CASRAI Dictionary defines terms such as APC, Gold Open Access and Diamond Open Access referenced throughout funder policy documents.

  • cOAlition S Funders: Who’s In, Who Has Left

    cOAlition S funders are the roughly two-dozen national research funders, charitable foundations and international bodies — including UKRI, Wellcome Trust, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Commission — that publicly endorsed Plan S in 2018 and continue to require immediate, CC BY open access from their grant recipients. Not every major funder stayed the course: the Gates Foundation has diverged toward a preprint-first model, and the European Research Council, Sweden’s Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and India’s national funders withdrew or declined to join outright.

    cOAlition S is the funder consortium — not a legal entity but a voluntary alliance of research-funding and research-performing organisations — that created and continues to steward Plan S, the 2018 open-access mandate requiring full and immediate public access to publications arising from the funding it provides. This guide sets out exactly who is in that coalition today, who has left, and what that split means for grants administrators trying to work out which awards trigger Plan S compliance obligations.

    What is cOAlition S and who funds it?

    cOAlition S launched on 4 September 2018 when a group of eleven national research funding organisations, coordinated through Science Europe, announced a “collective declaration of commitment” to mandate open access from 1 January 2020. The coalition has since grown to include national funders across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, several of the world’s largest biomedical and scientific charities, and formal support from the European Commission and the World Health Organization.

    Membership is not static. Funders join, adjust their policies, or step away as their own institutional priorities and legal constraints evolve — which is exactly why a periodically-updated reference list, rather than a single static claim, is the useful format for this question.

    Which funders currently back Plan S?

    cOAlition S’s own organisations page groups its supporters into national funders, charitable and international funders, and European funders (including the European Commission). Based on cOAlition S’s published membership record and the sourced Wikipedia membership history, the coalition’s core currently includes the following.

    • National research funders: UK Research and Innovation (UKRI); Austrian Science Fund (FWF); France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR); Science Foundation Ireland (SFI); Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN, Italy); Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR); Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO); Research Council of Norway (RCN); National Science Centre, Poland (NCN); Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal); Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS); Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas), Forte and Vinnova; Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF); Academy of Finland; National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC, Australia); South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC); Jordan’s Higher Council for Science and Technology; and Zambia’s National Science and Technology Council.
    • Charitable and international funders: Wellcome Trust; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (with a materially diverged policy — see below); the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); Templeton World Charity Foundation; and Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP).
    • Institutional and multilateral support: the European Commission, which funds Horizon Europe on Plan S-aligned open-access terms, and the World Health Organization.

    cOAlition S publishes this list as a live, JavaScript-rendered directory rather than a static page, so administrators verifying a specific funder’s status should cross-check coalition-s.org/organisations directly rather than relying solely on any single secondary source, including this one.

    Which funders have left or diverged from Plan S?

    Three organisations have formally withdrawn from or declined to join cOAlition S, and one major member has substantially diverged from the original Plan S model while remaining nominally affiliated.

    Funder Status What changed
    Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Member, policy diverged 2024 “preprint-centric” policy took effect January 2025; the foundation stopped paying article processing charges (APCs) and instead requires a preprint at or before formal publication, rather than mandating immediate open access to the accepted manuscript itself.
    European Research Council (ERC) Withdrew, July 2020 Supported the initiative from 2018 but its Scientific Council withdrew, citing concerns that Plan S’s implementation was too restrictive for early-career researchers and limited publication-venue choice.
    Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ), Sweden Left, 2019 An early signatory that withdrew citing concerns over the implementation timeline.
    India (national funders) Declined to join, October 2019 Principal Scientific Adviser Vijay Raghavan announced India would pursue its own national open-access policy rather than sign on to cOAlition S.

    The Gates Foundation case is the one administrators most often ask about, because Gates remains publicly associated with the open-access movement while its funding terms have moved furthest from the original Plan S template. Its 2024 policy refresh, reported by Nature in April 2024, replaced APC funding with a preprint-first requirement — a shift toward green, repository-based access rather than the gold, journal-published-and-APC-funded model Plan S initially popularised. Wellcome Trust, by contrast, has kept its CC BY, zero-embargo requirement fully aligned with Plan S principles and remains a full cOAlition S member.

    How does this affect grant compliance for administrators?

    For research administrators, the practical question is rarely “is my institution generally Plan S-aligned” — it is “does this specific grant trigger Plan S obligations.” That depends entirely on the funder listed on the award, not on the institution or the discipline.

    • A UKRI, Wellcome, SNSF, NWO or European Commission (Horizon Europe) grant carries a live Plan S-style requirement: immediate, CC BY, zero-embargo open access to the peer-reviewed manuscript, with rights retention where the funder has adopted that strategy.
    • A Gates Foundation grant awarded or renewed after January 2025 requires a preprint at or before publication, but no longer carries a guaranteed APC payment — so budgeting APCs into a Gates-funded proposal on the old assumption will leave a funding gap.
    • An ERC (Horizon Europe) grant sits in a genuinely mixed position: the ERC itself withdrew cOAlition S support in 2020, but ERC grants are still funded under Horizon Europe, which the European Commission administers on Plan S-aligned terms — so the operative obligation traces to the Commission’s rules, not the ERC’s own institutional stance.
    • A grant from a funder never affiliated with cOAlition S (most US federal agencies, most Indian national funders) should be checked against that funder’s own policy rather than assumed to follow Plan S at all.

    The single most reliable compliance step is to check the specific funder named on the award letter against cOAlition S’s current organisations list and that funder’s own most recent policy document, rather than relying on institutional memory of what a funder required in 2019 or 2020.

    Frequently asked questions

    Has the Gates Foundation left cOAlition S?

    No. The Gates Foundation remains formally affiliated with cOAlition S, but its 2024 policy refresh — effective January 2025 — dropped APC funding in favour of a preprint-first requirement, moving its practical terms away from the original Plan S model without a formal exit.

    Is Wellcome Trust still part of Plan S?

    Wellcome Trust is a founding cOAlition S member and remains fully aligned with Plan S: its open-access policy requires immediate deposit of the peer-reviewed manuscript under a CC BY licence with no embargo, matching the original 2018 mandate.

    Why did the European Research Council withdraw from cOAlition S?

    The European Research Council backed the initiative in 2018 but its Scientific Council withdrew support in July 2020, stating that Plan S’s implementation guidance was too restrictive, particularly for early-career researchers‘ choice of publication venue.

    Where can I find the full, current list of cOAlition S funders?

    cOAlition S publishes its authoritative, continuously updated member list at coalition-s.org/organisations, grouped into national funders, charitable and international funders, and European funders — administrators should treat that page, not older news coverage, as the source of record.

    Implications and outlook

    cOAlition S was never designed as a fixed, closed membership — it is a voluntary coalition that funders join and leave as their institutional strategies evolve. The Gates Foundation’s shift toward a preprint-centric model is the most consequential recent change because it signals that even committed founding-era supporters are questioning APC-funded gold open access as the default route, in favour of greener, lower-cost alternatives. For institutions with active research administration functions, the practical takeaway is to treat “is this funder in cOAlition S” as a per-grant lookup rather than a one-time institutional assumption, and to revisit that lookup whenever a funder announces a policy refresh.

  • Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy Explained: Requirements, APC Funding and the Plan S Link

    Wellcome Trust’s open access policy requires that original research articles arising, in whole or in part, from Wellcome funding be made freely available in Europe PMC immediately on publication, licensed CC BY, with no embargo permitted — a rule that has applied to all qualifying submissions since 1 January 2021 and is backed by direct grant-linked funding for publication costs.

    The Wellcome Trust open access policy is the funder’s mandatory requirement that peer-reviewed research articles, monographs and book chapters supported by its grants be deposited in Europe PMC (and NCBI Bookshelf, for long-form works) and openly licensed at the point of publication, with compliance routes and funding administered directly by Wellcome rather than through a separate national mandate.

    What Wellcome’s open access policy requires

    Wellcome’s current policy took effect for articles submitted from 1 January 2021. It applies to all original peer-reviewed research articles supported wholly or partly by Wellcome funding, and requires immediate, unembargoed open access with a CC BY licence (CC BY-ND only by case-by-case exception, requested before submission).

    Three routes satisfy the policy:

    • Gold route — publish in a fully open access journal or platform; the publisher deposits the version of record in PubMed Central and Europe PMC.
    • Green route — publish in a subscription journal and make the author accepted manuscript (AAM) open in Europe PMC immediately, under CC BY, via Wellcome’s rights retention clause.
    • Transformative-agreement route — publish through an institutional transformative agreement that makes the version of record open access.

    Scholarly monographs and book chapters carry a separate provision: they may be deposited up to six months after publication and are not required to use CC BY if another Creative Commons licence is more appropriate.

    How Wellcome funds APC and open access costs

    Wellcome funds open access directly rather than relying solely on national block-grant schemes. In the 2021/22 grant year, Wellcome awarded £7.2 million in open access block grants to 38 institutions, and 92% of individually reported articles complied with the policy, according to Wellcome’s own published guidance.

    The funding rules tightened materially from 1 January 2025: Wellcome now funds article processing charges only for research articles published in fully open access journals or platforms. Hybrid (“paywall-plus-OA-option”) subscription journals are no longer eligible for Wellcome APC funding, even where an institution holds a transformative agreement with the publisher — a stricter position than Wellcome held during 2021–2024, when transformative-agreement “publish” fees were still fundable.

    This mirrors the broader Plan S trajectory away from hybrid subsidy, but Wellcome reached the fully-OA-only funding line on its own timetable, separate from any coalition-wide deadline.

    Rights retention: the automatic CC BY clause

    Wellcome’s rights retention mechanism is built into its grant conditions rather than delivered through a separate author addendum. Since 1 January 2021, Wellcome grant terms automatically apply a CC BY licence to the author accepted manuscript of any original research article the grant supports, in whole or in part — meaning the author retains sufficient rights to make the AAM open immediately, regardless of a publisher’s default embargo.

    This differs in mechanism, though not in intent, from UKRI’s parallel approach. UKRI’s own open access policy, which took effect for journal articles submitted from 1 April 2022, established a comparable zero-embargo, CC BY-on-AAM route roughly fifteen months after Wellcome’s clause had already been in force.

    Funder Zero-embargo Green route Automatic CC BY on AAM effective from cOAlition S / Plan S status
    Wellcome Trust Yes 1 January 2021 Founding member
    UKRI Yes 1 April 2022 Founding member
    cOAlition S baseline (Plan S) Required for Green route Recommended coalition-wide via the Rights Retention Strategy Coalition framework itself

    Where an author cannot secure rights retention on the AAM and the article is not published Gold, several UK institutions — including UCL — accept a CC BY-licensed preprint deposited in a Europe PMC-indexed preprint server before publication as an alternative compliance path.

    Wellcome is a founding member of cOAlition S, the funder consortium that launched Plan S in September 2018 alongside Science Europe and the European Commission, and that now counts roughly two dozen funder organisations among its members. Wellcome’s current policy is deliberately aligned with Plan S’s core principles: immediate access, open licensing, and author choice of venue.

    But the relationship runs the other way chronologically. Wellcome introduced one of the world’s first funder open access mandates in 2006 — over a decade before Plan S existed — requiring deposit of funded research in PubMed Central. The 2021 policy update did not create Wellcome’s open access commitment; it tightened an existing mandate (removing the embargo Wellcome had previously permitted) specifically to bring it into line with Plan S’s stricter, zero-embargo standard. Wellcome-funded researchers can check which compliance route a given journal supports using the Journal Checker Tool, built jointly by cOAlition S and its funder members.

    Common questions about Wellcome’s policy

    Does Wellcome Trust pay for open access publishing?

    Yes. Wellcome funds APCs directly for articles in fully open access journals and platforms, distributes annual open access block grants to grant-holding institutions, and separately funds compliant open access publication of monographs and book chapters on request.

    What licence does Wellcome require for open access articles?

    CC BY is the default requirement for all research articles made open under the policy. A more restrictive CC BY-ND licence is permitted only by prior, case-by-case exception, requested through Wellcome’s dedicated request form before submission.

    Is Wellcome Trust part of Plan S?

    Yes. Wellcome is a founding member of cOAlition S, the funder coalition behind Plan S. Its own open access policy is fully aligned with Plan S principles, though Wellcome’s underlying open access mandate predates Plan S by more than ten years.

    What happens if a Wellcome-funded paper doesn’t comply?

    Non-compliant articles are not automatically penalised per se, but Wellcome tracks compliance rates at institutional level, ties future open access block grant funding to institutional performance, and expects grant-holding organisations to actively support researchers in meeting the policy’s routes.

    Implications for institutions and researchers

    For research administrators managing Wellcome grant portfolios, the practical shift is the narrowing of fundable routes since January 2025: budgeting for hybrid-journal APCs against Wellcome funds is no longer viable outside a qualifying transformative agreement’s non-hybrid terms, so pre-submission journal checking has become a compliance necessity rather than a courtesy.

    Researchers publishing in subscription journals should treat rights retention as the default fallback, since it requires no publisher fee and no embargo negotiation — the CC BY licence on the accepted manuscript is already secured by the grant terms before the paper is ever submitted.

    Outlook

    Wellcome’s trajectory — mandate first, coalition alignment second, funding restriction third — has become a template other funders are following at their own pace. As UKRI, NIHR and other cOAlition S members continue tightening hybrid-journal funding eligibility, institutions that already built Wellcome-compliant workflows around zero-embargo Green routes are better placed to absorb the next round of funder-specific restrictions.

  • Gates Foundation Open Access Policy: No More APCs for cOAlition S Funders

    The Gates Foundation open access policy was refreshed for 2025, taking effect on 1 January 2025: the foundation stopped paying article processing charges (APCs) for individual manuscripts, added a mandatory preprint-deposit requirement, and expanded the policy’s scope to cover every funded manuscript and its underlying data.

    The Gates Foundation open access policy is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s mandatory framework requiring that all peer-reviewed research and data arising from its funding be made freely available, openly licensed, and reusable without embargo. As a founding member of cOAlition S, the funder that co-created and popularised Plan S in 2018, the foundation’s 2025 refresh is being watched closely as a signal of where other research funders may be heading on APC costs.

    What Changed in the 2025 Policy Refresh?

    The 2025 policy is framed as a “refresh” of the 2021 policy, not a wholesale replacement — the core repository mandate survives intact. What changes is scope and support. It now applies to “all published research funded, in whole or in part, by the foundation” — termed Funded Manuscripts — and to “any data underlying the Funded Manuscripts,” a broader remit than the 2021 text.

    Three elements define the refresh:

    • Mandatory preprint deposit for every funded manuscript, in addition to the existing accepted-manuscript deposit requirement.
    • An earlier trigger for open data: data must now be accessible as soon as the preprint is available, not only once the accepted article is published.
    • Withdrawal of financial support for individual APC payments, shifting that cost onto grantees and co-authors.

    Why Did the Foundation Stop Paying APCs?

    The 2025 policy is unambiguous on this point: “The Foundation Will Not Pay Article Processing Charges (APC). Any publication fees are the responsibility of the grantees and their co-authors.” This is a change to support, not to what is mandated — grantees were never obliged to use the foundation’s APC funds under the 2021 policy, but many did, particularly for publishing in fully open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

    The foundation frames this as part of a wider push against the gold-OA/APC model, which critics argue rewards well-resourced authors while pricing out others. Rather than underwriting per-article fees, it says it will back non-APC routes to open publishing, including its own Gates Open Research platform and select publisher partnerships covering Gates-funded authors outside the standard APC mechanism.

    The practical effect falls unevenly. Per an analysis by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe in The Scholarly Kitchen (15 April 2024), Gates grantees publish roughly 4,000 papers a year — about 0.07% of articles published globally — so the aggregate revenue impact on any single open-access publisher is likely modest, even though the effect on individual grantees lacking alternative funding can be significant.

    What Does the New Preprint-First Mandate Require?

    Every Funded Manuscript must now be “published as a preprint in a preprint server recognized by the foundation” that applies sufficient scrutiny, carrying a CC BY 4.0 licence or equivalent. This sits alongside — not instead of — the existing requirement that the accepted manuscript be deposited “immediately upon publication in PubMed Central (PMC), or in another openly accessible repository, with proper metadata tagging identifying Gates funding.”

    Two details matter for compliance teams:

    • Grantees can self-exempt from the preprint requirement where they determine “a preprint is not appropriate due to ethical, safety or other legitimate concerns” — the foundation has not yet published criteria for what counts.
    • The foundation is not mandating a single preprint server. It has said it will point grantees to ASAPbio’s preprint server directory rather than maintain its own list, though it separately partnered with Taylor & Francis/F1000 to launch VeriXiv, a verified preprint platform grantees may optionally use.

    Copyright-retention language is essentially unchanged: grantees must retain enough copyright to deposit and licence the manuscript CC BY 4.0, and include a foundation-mandated acknowledgement and rights-retention statement.

    How Does Gates Compare With Other cOAlition S Funders?

    The Gates Foundation is not the only cOAlition S member re-examining its terms, but it is the first founding funder to formally withdraw central APC funding. Wellcome Trust and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the two other funders most closely associated with Plan S’s origins, still fund publication fees through institutional block-grant mechanisms rather than the pay-per-article support the Gates Foundation has now dropped.

    Funder Current policy effective date Pays APCs? Preprint requirement
    Gates Foundation 1 January 2025 (refresh) No — discontinued for individual manuscripts Mandatory, narrow ethical/safety exemption
    Wellcome Trust 1 January 2021 Yes — via institutional block grants Encouraged, not mandated
    UKRI 1 April 2022 (journal articles); 1 January 2024 (monographs) Yes — via block grant to research organisations Not mandated
    cOAlition S / Plan S baseline Founding principles from 2018 Funder-dependent; no central APC cap post-2024 Not centrally mandated; Rights Retention Strategy supported

    cOAlition S has been diplomatic about the change. Responding to the refresh, Executive Director Johan Rooryck said: “Five years on since Plan S was first published, it is entirely appropriate that funders are reviewing their OA policies to ensure they are effectively meeting their goals… Our collective dedication to making full and immediate OA a reality remains the driving force behind our collaboration.” Separately, Rooryck told Nature the refreshed policy is not “entirely in line” with cOAlition S guidance, while noting member funders retain “a lot of leeway” in how they implement shared principles. The Scholarly Kitchen nonetheless judges the policy relatively well aligned with Plan S’s repository route, since the accepted-manuscript deposit mandate — the mechanism that satisfies Plan S compliance — is retained, not replaced.

    Common Questions About the Gates Foundation Open Access Policy

    Does the Gates Foundation still pay APCs?

    No. Since the 2025 Open Access Policy took effect on 1 January 2025, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation no longer pays article processing charges for individual manuscripts. Publication fees are now the responsibility of grantees and co-authors, though the foundation continues to fund open infrastructure and select publisher arrangements.

    Does the Gates Foundation require preprints?

    Yes. Under the 2025 policy, every funded manuscript must be posted as a preprint on a foundation-recognised server carrying a CC BY 4.0 licence, in addition to the existing requirement to deposit the accepted manuscript in PubMed Central or another open repository. Grantees may seek an exemption only for documented ethical or safety concerns.

    Is the Gates Foundation still aligned with Plan S?

    Largely, yes. cOAlition S publicly welcomed the 2025 refresh, and analysts judge the policy broadly consistent with Plan S‘s repository route despite the APC-funding withdrawal. Executive Director Johan Rooryck said the update reflects funders “reviewing their OA policies,” while stopping short of declaring it fully in line with coalition guidance.

    What are the Gates Foundation’s data-sharing requirements?

    The 2025 policy requires underlying data to be openly accessible immediately once the funded manuscript becomes available — including at the preprint stage. This is earlier than the 2021 policy, which triggered the data-sharing mandate only once the accepted article was formally published in a journal.

    Implications and What to Watch Next

    For grantees without alternative funding, the squeeze is real: authors who relied on Gates APC support for DOAJ-listed open-access journals must now find a fee waiver, an institutional agreement, or a non-APC venue, while still meeting deposit and rights-retention requirements some publishers only accommodate via paid gold-OA routes. Research administrators managing multi-funder compliance will need to track this alongside UKRI and Wellcome Trust obligations, since the three funders no longer follow a uniform APC-support model despite shared Plan S origins.

    For publishers, immediate revenue exposure looks limited given the modest volume of Gates-funded output, but the policy adds pressure toward non-APC business models — waiver programmes, “pure publish” institutional agreements, and preprint-native platforms — that cOAlition S’s own “Beyond Article-Based Charges” working group, established with Jisc and PLOS, is separately examining.

    The signal for other funders is the more consequential story. Gates is the first cOAlition S founding member to formally withdraw central APC funding while retaining a Plan S-compatible repository mandate. Whether Wellcome Trust, UKRI, or other coalition funders follow with funding recalibrations — rather than eligibility or embargo changes — is the development worth monitoring as institutions plan multi-year compliance budgets.

    Research administrators managing multi-funder open access compliance can find related standards context in CASRAI’s research administration resources.

  • 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.