CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: european commission plan s open access

  • Has cOAlition S Retreated From Plan S Rules?

    cOAlition S has not abandoned the goal of full and immediate open access, but its 2026-2030 strategy drops the enforcement mechanism that made Plan S distinctive: financial support for transformative agreements ended after 2024, replaced by a looser, consultation-led push toward diamond open access and preprints. Science.org’s reporting calls this a retreat from strict requirements; cOAlition S calls it a “recalibration” of the same founding mission. Both are partly right, and research administrators deciding how much weight to put on the new targets need to understand exactly what changed.

    Plan S is the funder mandate, launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, requiring that publications from publicly funded research be made immediately available under an open licence, without embargo, from 2021 onward. cOAlition S is the consortium of national and philanthropic research funders — including UKRI and the Wellcome Trust — that created and enforces that mandate.

    What Does the 2026-2030 Strategy Actually Change?

    The cOAlition S Strategy 2026-2030, adopted by the coalition’s Leaders Group in November 2025, keeps the founding commitment to full and immediate open access but widens the toolkit for getting there. Where the original Plan S centred on a single lever — funder mandates tied to compliance checks — the new strategy explicitly states that “no single model can meet all needs” and extends its focus “beyond mandates and funding conditions.”

    Three priorities anchor the plan: strengthening the foundations for sustainable and equitable open access (including an update to the Plan S principles to foreground Publish-Review-Curate models, diamond open access and preprints); supporting open digital infrastructures, including work on artificial intelligence’s implications for scholarly publishing; and exploring financially sustainable, non-APC publishing systems. Implementation runs in two phases — foundational work in 2026-2027, followed by a deeper equity and sustainability push in 2028-2030, subject to Leaders Group review.

    Why Does Science.org Call This a Retreat?

    Science.org’s analysis, headlined “After Coalition S disrupted scientific publishing, new plan retreats from strict requirements,” argues the new strategy has no teeth. Its central claim: cOAlition S is trading enforceable compliance rules for a broader, softer vision that favours alternatives to paywalled journals without committing to actually replace them.

    The magazine credits the original Plan S with helping push the global share of newly published papers appearing as open access above 50% within a few years of the 2021 mandate taking effect. But it also revisits a well-documented side effect: Plan S’s compliance route pushed many publishers toward author-pays gold and hybrid open access, and some prestigious journals now charge authors thousands of dollars per article while continuing to publish paywalled content elsewhere in the same title. A commentary from Science’s news desk on social media put the critique concisely: the latest strategy “emphasizes consultation, but lacks spending pledges.”

    • No new mandate deadlines are attached to the 2026-2030 priorities.
    • No enforcement or compliance-checking mechanism replaces the one built around transformative agreements.
    • Financial commitments are framed as exploratory (“investigate,” “monitor”) rather than binding.

    How Does cOAlition S Defend the New Strategy?

    cOAlition S rejects the framing of “retreat” outright. Its own communications describe the strategy as reinforcing, not loosening, its open access commitment, under a refreshed vision of “a scholarly communication system that enables rapid, open, transparent, and equitable sharing of trustworthy scientific knowledge.”

    The coalition points to concrete institution-building as evidence of continuity rather than disengagement: it appointed Curt Rice — former rector of Oslo Metropolitan University and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and former Executive Director of Fulbright Norway — as its first standing Director, announced 13 May 2026, specifically to lead delivery of the 2026-2030 strategy. It has also named OPERAS, the European research infrastructure for open scholarly communication, as its new Host Secretariat, and it co-produced the Bengaluru Roadmap and Action Plan on Diamond Open Access at the 3rd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access. None of that reads as an organisation stepping back — it reads as one restructuring around a different theory of change: build sustainable, non-commercial infrastructure rather than police compliance.

    What Happens to Transformative Agreements?

    Transformative agreements — the “read and publish” deals between institutions and publishers designed to convert subscription spend into open access output — are the clearest casualty of the shift. cOAlition S confirmed the end of its financial support for open access publishing under transformative arrangements after 2024, having already stopped accepting new applications to the programme after 30 June 2023.

    In their place, the 2026-2030 strategy channels investment toward diamond open access — journals and platforms that charge neither authors nor readers — and toward preprint infrastructure. Diamond open access is a publishing model funded through institutional, library-consortium or public grants rather than per-article charges, positioned by cOAlition S as the more equitable long-term alternative to both subscription paywalls and high-cost APCs.

    Mechanism Status under Plan S (2018-2024) Status under 2026-2030 strategy
    Transformative agreements Funded as a transitional route to compliance Funding ended after 2024; no new applications since June 2023
    Diamond open access Encouraged, not prioritised Named strategic priority, backed by the Bengaluru Roadmap
    Compliance mandate Immediate OA required from 2021, checked via the Journal Checker Tool Principles retained, but no new binding deadlines set
    Governance Coordinated informally among funders Standing Director (Curt Rice) and OPERAS-hosted Secretariat

    Answer-First Questions on Plan S and cOAlition S

    What Is Plan S?

    Plan S is a funder-led initiative, launched in September 2018, requiring that publications resulting from publicly funded research be published in open-access journals, on open-access platforms, or deposited in open repositories immediately, without embargo. It is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of national and philanthropic research funders.

    What Is the Main Principle of Plan S?

    The core principle is that, from 2021, all scholarly publications funded by public or private grants from participating funders must be made immediately available in open access, without embargo, under an open licence — typically CC BY. That mandate remains unchanged in the 2026-2030 strategy; what has changed is how compliance is supported.

    Is Open Access Always Free for Everyone?

    No. Open access guarantees free reading access, not free publishing. Under the author-pays model that expanded alongside Plan S compliance, many journals shifted costs onto authors through article processing charges, which critics — including Science.org — argue created a new equity problem the 2026-2030 strategy now explicitly tries to address through diamond open access.

    What Does This Mean for Institutions and Publishers?

    For research administrators and institutional leaders, the practical takeaway is that Plan S’s headline compliance requirement has not disappeared — the Journal Checker Tool still governs how researchers assess eligible venues — but the financial pressure that pushed publishers into transformative agreements has been withdrawn. Institutions currently relying on transformative deals negotiated with cOAlition S funding in mind should not assume renewal on the same terms.

    Publishers, meanwhile, face a genuine strategic fork: continue investing in APC-based hybrid and gold open access, where cOAlition S funding is no longer available, or build toward diamond and Publish-Review-Curate models that better match the coalition’s stated 2028-2030 priorities. Institutions tracking funder mandates and compliance timelines through their research administration functions will find this shift material to budget planning, not just messaging.

    Neither “retreat” nor “recalibration” fully settles the argument. Science.org is correct that the new strategy carries no new enforcement mechanism and no fresh spending pledge. cOAlition S is correct that its founding mandate — immediate, unembargoed open access — has not been withdrawn on paper. The honest reading sits between the two: cOAlition S has traded a narrower, harder lever for a broader, softer one, betting that infrastructure and diamond open access will do the work that compliance deadlines used to do. Whether that bet pays off will be visible well before 2030, in whether diamond open access funding actually scales and whether APC inflation slows without a mandate forcing the issue.

  • 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.

  • Transformative Agreements End: Diamond OA Pivot Under cOAlition S 2026–2030 Strategy

    cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 strategy, published 12 November 2025, confirms that transformative agreements no longer sit at the centre of its open access policy: funders will not fund new transformative agreements by default (a position effective since 2025), and the coalition is redirecting policy attention and infrastructure investment toward diamond open access, preprints, and publish-review-curate models. For library consortia and research offices still budgeting around read-and-publish renewals, this is the point at which planning assumptions need to change.

    A transformative agreement is a contract negotiated between a library, national consortium, or regional grouping and a publisher that repurposes former subscription spending into payment for open access publishing services, intended as a temporary bridge from subscription access to a fully open access system rather than a permanent settlement.

    What Changed in cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 Strategy

    cOAlition S confirmed the end of its financial support for open access publishing under transformative arrangements after 31 December 2024, a position it first announced on 26 January 2023 and formalised in the Plan S Implementation Guidance. From 2025, participating funders stopped treating a transformative agreement as automatically compliant with Plan S; authors must instead demonstrate compliance through full open access publication, an independently negotiated agreement meeting transparency criteria, or rights retention.

    The coalition’s Strategy 2026–2030, released 12 November 2025, builds on that withdrawal rather than reversing it. The document sets three strategic priorities: strengthening the foundations of full, immediate, sustainable, and equitable open access (including a review of the Plan S principles to give explicit weight to publish-review-curate models, diamond open access, and preprints); supporting the digital infrastructures that make open access sustainable; and exploring financially sustainable, equitable publishing systems with formal monitoring of policy impact.

    Implementation runs in two phases: an initial two-year period from 2026 to 2027, followed by 2028–2030, with second-phase priorities to be set by the coalition’s Leaders Group based on what the first phase delivers. The coalition itself has grown considerably during this period, from 12 founding organisations at Plan S’s 2018 launch to 28 funders spanning Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa, and Australia.

    Why cOAlition S Is Moving Away From Transformative Agreements

    cOAlition S’s own reasoning is explicit: continuing to fund transformative arrangements indefinitely risked making them permanent, which the coalition has stated would perpetuate the hybrid open access model it has consistently opposed. Individual funders retain discretion to keep supporting transformative agreements as part of national strategies, and any such exceptions are published on the cOAlition S website, but this is now framed as an exception rather than the default route.

    Independent data on open access growth supports the coalition’s case that the market has moved on from where it stood when transformative agreements were designed. According to the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), the share of articles, reviews, and conference papers published immediately as gold open access rose from 14% in 2014 to 40% in 2024, while the subscription-only share fell from 70% to 54% over the same decade. Gold open access, funded through article processing charges, is now the dominant open route — which is precisely the outcome the coalition says has intensified concerns about cost and equity, and pushed diamond open access up its agenda.

    Lidia Borrell-Damián, chair of the cOAlition S executive steering group and Secretary General of Science Europe, has summarised the shift directly: “We are trying to shift the market towards more diverse, sustainable approaches.” Not every commentator reads the pivot the same way. Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and a co-founder of the preprint server bioRxiv, has argued that Plan S has gone from being “fairly specific” — originally focused on flipping subscription journals through transformative agreements — to “rather vague,” now spanning preprints, alternative peer review, and diamond open access simultaneously.

    Open access route Who typically pays cOAlition S funder support, 2026–2030
    Transformative agreement (read & publish) Library or consortium, bundled with subscription Not funded as a default compliance route since 2025; national exceptions only
    Gold open access (APC) Author, institution, or funder, per article Recognised route; cost and equity impacts now formally monitored
    Rights retention (green OA + CC BY manuscript) No publishing fee; repository deposit Default compliance mechanism where no other route applies
    Diamond/platinum open access Universities, societies, funders, consortia infrastructure Named strategic priority; principles review and infrastructure investment
    Publish-review-curate (PRC) / preprints Funder or community infrastructure Included in the 2026–2027 principles review

    What Library Consortia and Research Offices Need to Renegotiate

    Consortia that built multi-year budgets around transformative agreement renewals now need to treat those renewals as contestable rather than routine. The practical work falls into a small number of categories.

    • Audit existing transformative agreements against cOAlition S’s current compliance rules, and flag which corresponding authors and grants are affected by the loss of default recognition.
    • Reopen consortium-level negotiations with publishers whose transformative agreements are approaching renewal, testing whether an independently negotiated, transparent read-and-publish deal or a conversion to full open access better serves the portfolio.
    • Reallocate a share of subscription and APC budgets toward diamond open access infrastructure — journal platforms, society publishing services, and consortium-run funds — in line with cOAlition S’s stated 2026–2027 priority of supporting digital publishing infrastructure.
    • Strengthen rights retention workflows so that manuscript deposit with a CC BY licence happens at submission, since this remains the fallback compliance route wherever a transformative agreement no longer applies.
    • Track the ESAC Initiative’s transformative agreement registry and national consortium reporting to benchmark negotiating positions against comparable institutions rather than negotiating in isolation.

    Institutions with mature identifier and metadata infrastructure — ORCID, DataCite, and CrossRef records consistently linked to funder awards — are better placed to demonstrate compliance under this more fragmented set of routes than institutions still relying on a publisher-reported transformative agreement dashboard.

    Answer-First Q&A: Transformative Agreements and Diamond Open Access

    What is a transformative agreement?

    A transformative agreement is an umbrella term, defined by the ESAC Initiative, for contracts negotiated between institutions and publishers that repurpose former subscription expenditure to remunerate publishers for open access publishing services, gradually shifting the underlying business model from toll access toward open access.

    What is a transformative journal?

    A transformative journal is a subscription or hybrid journal that commits to a defined trajectory toward full open access, including a rising share of open access content and offsetting subscription income against publishing fees. cOAlition S also withdrew financial recognition of this route after 2024.

    What is diamond open access?

    Diamond (or platinum) open access describes journals and platforms that charge no fee to either authors or readers, with publishing costs instead covered by universities, scholarly societies, funders, or library consortia. It is a named strategic priority in cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 strategy.

    Is a transformative agreement still Plan S compliant?

    A transformative agreement can still satisfy Plan S if it is published on an individual funder’s list of recognised exceptions for national strategies; otherwise, cOAlition S no longer treats it as automatically compliant, and authors must use full open access, an approved independent agreement, or rights retention instead.

    Implications and What Comes Next

    The near-term implication is budgetary and administrative: consortia negotiating transformative agreement renewals in 2026 and 2027 should expect publishers to resist unwinding these deals, since they remain commercially attractive, even as funder recognition narrows. The medium-term implication is structural: cOAlition S’s own strategy explicitly ties future funding priorities to diamond open access and shared infrastructure, meaning consortium budgets that continue flowing entirely through subscription-linked read-and-publish deals will increasingly diverge from where funder policy is heading.

    The second phase of the strategy, from 2028 to 2030, is not yet fixed; cOAlition S’s Leaders Group will set those priorities based on what the 2026–2027 principles review and infrastructure investments actually deliver. Institutions that use the next two years to build diamond open access contributions, tighten rights-retention deposit workflows, and maintain clean, linked identifier metadata will be negotiating from a position of readiness rather than catching up once the second phase is confirmed.

    See the CASRAI Dictionary for definitions of related open access and compliance terms, and the CASRAI research administration hub for broader compliance and infrastructure guidance.

  • RCUK Open Access Report: What Changed Under UKRI

    The RCUK open access report was the annual institutional compliance return that UK universities filed to Research Councils UK from 2013, tracking block-grant spend and Gold/Green compliance rates. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) absorbed this reporting duty on its formation in 2018 and then retired the manual return altogether under its harmonised 2022 open access policy.

    The Research Councils UK (RCUK) open access policy is the funder mandate, introduced on 1 April 2013, that required peer-reviewed outputs acknowledging Research Council funding to be made freely accessible via a Gold or Green route.

    What was the RCUK open access report?

    The RCUK open access report was an institution-level compliance return, typically prepared as a spreadsheet, that recorded how each university’s RCUK block grant had been spent and what proportion of eligible outputs met the policy’s Gold or Green requirements. Research organisations receiving RCUK open access block grants were expected to submit these figures annually to the relevant research council.

    Under the RCUK policy, Gold open access — the publisher making the final Version of Record free on publication, usually funded by an Article Processing Charge (APC) — was the preferred route, supported by direct block-grant payments to institutions. Green open access, depositing the Author’s Accepted Manuscript in a repository, was permitted subject to an embargo of up to six months for STEM subjects and twelve months for arts, humanities and social sciences. Universities such as Imperial College London, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Southampton published detailed versions of their own compliance reports, illustrating how administratively heavy the annual return had become by the mid-2010s.

    Why UKRI absorbed RCUK’s reporting regime

    UKRI was formed on 1 April 2018 under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, bringing together the seven former Research Councils, Innovate UK and Research England into a single funding body. This merger created both the opportunity and the obligation to harmonise the fragmented council-by-council open access reporting that RCUK had left behind.

    UKRI subsequently ran a formal open access policy review, consulting institutions, publishers and researchers, with the explicit goal of replacing seven overlapping council policies — and their separate compliance paperwork — with a single UKRI-wide mandate. UKRI is also a member of cOAlition S, the international funder consortium behind Plan S, which launched in 2018 and became fully operative for its members on 1 January 2021. Plan S’s ten principles, including immediate open access with no embargo and a preference for CC BY licensing, became the template UKRI built its new policy around, rather than a patchwork of council-specific embargo periods.

    What changed under the 2022 UKRI open access policy

    The new UKRI open access policy took effect on 1 April 2022 for peer-reviewed research articles and conference papers with an ISSN, and on 1 January 2024 for monographs, book chapters and edited collections. It requires immediate open access with no embargo permitted, via either Gold (Version of Record free on the publisher’s site) or Green (Author’s Accepted Manuscript in a repository, released immediately under a CC BY licence through UKRI’s Rights Retention Strategy).

    The most consequential change for research administrators is what UKRI removed, not just what it added: the annual institutional compliance spreadsheet that defined the RCUK era is gone. UKRI monitors compliance through existing publication metadata — repository records, CrossRef and publisher data — rather than requiring institutions to submit a standalone report. UKRI has also committed a dedicated fund of £3.5 million per year to support open access costs for long-form outputs, separate from the block-grant model that funded RCUK-era Gold APCs.

    • No embargo permitted on journal articles or conference papers from 1 April 2022
    • CC BY is the default licence, with CC BY-ND permitted only by exception
    • Monographs, book chapters and edited collections join the policy from 1 January 2024
    • Compliance monitoring shifts from submitted spreadsheets to existing metadata sources

    RCUK vs UKRI open access reporting compared

    The table below sets out the practical differences institutions need to reconcile when auditing historical RCUK-funded outputs against current UKRI-funded ones.

    Aspect RCUK policy (2013–2022) UKRI policy (from 2022/2024)
    Reporting mechanism Annual institutional compliance spreadsheet submitted per council Monitoring via existing publication metadata; no standalone institutional report
    Governing body Seven separate Research Councils Single UKRI-wide policy
    Green embargo Up to 6 months (STEM) / 12 months (AHSS) No embargo permitted
    Default licence Not standardised across councils CC BY, via the Rights Retention Strategy
    Scope Peer-reviewed articles and conference papers Adds monographs, book chapters, edited collections from 2024
    Funding model Block grants to institutions Block grants plus a dedicated £3.5m/year long-form fund

    Frequently asked questions

    What is an open access report?

    An open access report is a compliance return that documents whether research outputs funded by a body such as RCUK or UKRI meet that funder’s open access requirements. Under RCUK it was an institution-submitted spreadsheet tracking block-grant spend; under UKRI, compliance is now inferred from publication metadata rather than a submitted document.

    What is the RCUK policy on open access and supporting guidance?

    The RCUK policy on open access, introduced 1 April 2013, required peer-reviewed papers acknowledging Research Council funding to be made freely available through Gold or Green routes, supported by block-grant guidance issued to research organisations on eligible costs and embargo limits.

    What was the UKRI open access review?

    The UKRI open access review was a formal consultation process examining UKRI’s inherited RCUK-era policies to design a single, harmonised mandate. It engaged institutions, publishers and researchers, and its outcome was the 2022 UKRI open access policy that superseded all seven prior council-specific arrangements.

    What are open access requirements under UKRI?

    Current UKRI open access requirements mandate immediate access with no embargo for journal articles funded from 1 April 2022, a CC BY licence by default, and a Data Access Statement in every covered article, whether or not underlying data exists.

    What this means for institutions filing compliance today

    Research offices auditing historical outputs still need to apply RCUK-era rules — embargo periods, council-specific block-grant terms — to anything published before 1 April 2022, while applying the no-embargo UKRI standard to everything after. This dual-track reality means institutional repositories and current research information systems (CRIS) should retain the ability to flag which regime governed a given output, since RCUK-era Green deposits legitimately carried embargoes that would now be non-compliant under UKRI rules.

    Because UKRI no longer requires a submitted spreadsheet, the burden has shifted from periodic reporting to continuous metadata hygiene: accurate funder acknowledgement, licence tagging and repository deposit timing now do the compliance work that the annual RCUK report used to do. Institutions should also note that the separate REF 2021 open access policy, which required AAM deposit within three months of acceptance, ran on its own track alongside RCUK and is expected to align more closely with UKRI’s approach under the successor REF exercise.

    Conclusion: where UK open access reporting goes next

    The transition from RCUK to UKRI did not add a new reporting layer — it removed one. The annual compliance spreadsheet that defined a decade of RCUK administration has been replaced by metadata-driven monitoring under a single UKRI policy shaped by cOAlition S’s Plan S principles. For institutions, the practical task now is less about filing a report and more about ensuring the underlying publication record is accurate enough that UKRI’s monitoring can find compliance without being told about it.

    For research administrators managing legacy and current outputs side by side, understanding which policy era governs a given publication remains essential groundwork before any funder audit.

  • 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.