In November 2025, cOAlition S — the funder alliance behind Plan S — published its strategic direction for 2026 to 2030, and the cOAlition S strategy 2026 document marks the most significant recalibration of the coalition’s open access policy since Plan S launched in 2018. For research offices, the headline is not that open access requirements are loosening. It is that the coalition is walking away from the transformative agreements it once tolerated as a bridge to full open access, while redirecting funder investment toward diamond open access and reaffirming, unchanged, its core mandate for immediate open access under a CC BY licence.
For institutions that built compliance workflows around transformative “read and publish” deals, this is not a minor administrative footnote. It changes which routes to compliance your researchers can rely on, which publisher agreements your library or research office should keep renewing, and where new funding lines for open infrastructure are likely to appear over the next four years. This explainer sets out what has actually changed, what has stayed the same, and what research administrators should be updating in internal open access policy documents now.
cOAlition S 2026 to 2030 strategy: the end of transformative agreement support
Transformative agreements — the large “read and publish” or “publish and read” contracts negotiated between library consortia and major publishers such as Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley — were always framed by cOAlition S as a temporary compliance route, not a destination. They allowed institutions to satisfy Plan S requirements without every researcher negotiating individual article processing charge (APC) waivers or rights-retention clauses, on the understanding that publishers would use the revenue to convert subscription journals to fully open access titles within a defined period.
The cOAlition S 2026 to 2030 strategy confirms that this transitional support is over. Funders in the coalition will no longer treat transformative agreements as an acceptable long-term compliance mechanism, reflecting a long-standing concern, raised repeatedly since the original Plan S implementation guidance, that many transformative deals converted little content to genuine open access while entrenching APC-based publishing economics at large commercial publishers. Institutions that have relied on a transformative agreement as their primary Plan S compliance route should treat this as a signal to diversify, not a cliff-edge deadline to panic over, but the direction of travel is unambiguous: the coalition wants funded researchers publishing through routes that do not depend on subscription-linked bundled contracts.
Expanding diamond open access investment
The counterpart to withdrawing support from transformative agreements is an expansion of funder investment in diamond open access — journals and platforms that charge no fee to authors and no subscription fee to readers, typically run by universities, learned societies, library consortia or national research infrastructures rather than commercial publishers. This builds on work already under way through the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access and the DIAMAS project, which have mapped the diamond OA landscape across Europe and identified capacity, quality-assurance and sustainability gaps in community-owned publishing.
For research offices, the practical implication is that the menu of “approved” publication venues under funder open access policy is likely to broaden to include more diamond OA journals and platforms, some of which may be less familiar to academic staff than established commercial titles. Research administrators should expect funders to ask institutions to help identify, vet and promote diamond OA venues in their disciplines, and to factor diamond OA into researcher guidance rather than treating APC-based gold open access as the default paid route to compliance.
What hasn’t changed: the immediate CC BY mandate
It would be a mistake to read the cOAlition S 2026 to 2030 strategy as a loosening of open access requirements. The core Plan S principle — that research arising from coalition-funded grants must be made immediately open access, with no embargo, under a CC BY licence (or, in defined circumstances, CC BY-ND) — remains fully in force. So does the Rights Retention Strategy, which allows authors to apply an open licence to the author accepted manuscript at the point of submission, regardless of the publisher’s own policy, precisely so that researchers are not locked into paying an APC or relying on a transformative agreement to comply.
In other words, Plan S gold open access — publishing in a fully open journal, whether APC-funded or diamond — remains one valid compliance route, as does green open access via rights retention and immediate deposit in a repository. What the 2026 to 2030 strategy removes is institutional and publisher reliance on transformative agreements as a proxy for compliance, and what it adds is funder appetite to underwrite non-APC alternatives so that gold open access is no longer synonymous with paying a commercial publisher.
cOAlition S members and the wider funding landscape
cOAlition S members include UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Science Foundation Ireland, Luxembourg’s Fonds National de la Recherche, and the European Commission acting on behalf of Horizon Europe, among other national and regional funders. Because these funders between them cover a substantial share of publicly funded research across Europe, a strategic shift of this kind has effects well beyond the institutions directly funded by coalition members — publishers and platforms that want to remain viable routes to compliance for European-funded authors have to adapt their offerings accordingly, and non-coalition funders elsewhere often watch cOAlition S’s direction when reviewing their own mandates.
Research offices supporting international, multi-funder projects should note that not every funder a researcher reports to will move at the same pace. Where a project is co-funded by a cOAlition S member and a funder with a different open access policy, the more stringent requirement typically governs compliance — so the withdrawal of transformative agreement support from coalition funders does not automatically loosen obligations under, for example, UKRI’s own open access policy or NIH data-sharing requirements, which continue to operate on their own terms.
What This Means for Research Administrators
Institutional open access policies, researcher guidance pages and library-negotiated agreement lists were largely written on the assumption that transformative agreements were a stable, funder-endorsed compliance route. That assumption no longer holds for cOAlition S-funded research. Research offices should treat the following as near-term priorities:
- Audit compliance messaging. Update internal guidance that lists transformative agreements as a “safe” route to Plan S compliance; reframe them as one option among several, with declining funder endorsement.
- Reconfirm rights retention workflows. Ensure researchers and grants staff understand that applying a CC BY licence to the author accepted manuscript at submission, under the Rights Retention Strategy, remains a robust and funder-preferred compliance path that does not depend on any publisher contract.
- Map diamond OA venues in relevant disciplines. Work with library and repository teams to identify credible diamond open access journals and platforms so researchers have a vetted list rather than discovering options ad hoc.
- Flag co-funding conflicts early. Where projects have mixed funding sources, confirm which policy is most stringent before advising researchers on their compliance route.
- Watch publisher responses. Expect publishers with large transformative agreement portfolios to adjust pricing, waiver schemes or their own diamond and community-publishing offerings in response to reduced funder backing — track these changes when renewing agreements.
- Brief research leadership. Associate deans for research and heads of library services should be aware that funder-endorsed compliance routes are shifting, ahead of the next round of institutional open access policy review.
Conclusion
The cOAlition S strategy 2026 announcement does not soften Plan S; it sharpens the coalition’s original argument that open access should not simply reproduce commercial subscription economics under a new name. By withdrawing endorsement from transformative agreements and channelling investment toward diamond open access, cOAlition S is betting that community-owned, non-APC publishing can scale to meet demand that was previously absorbed by bundled publisher contracts. Whether that bet pays off will depend on how quickly diamond OA infrastructure can absorb volume without compromising editorial quality or long-term sustainability — a question the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access and DIAMAS project were designed to help answer.
For research administrators, the practical task is less about reacting to a single announcement and more about maintaining policy documents that can flex as funder expectations continue to evolve through 2030. Institutions that keep rights retention workflows well understood, diamond OA options mapped, and researcher guidance current will be best placed to support compliance regardless of which route to open access their funders favour next.