CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: journal checker tool

  • Journal Finder Tools Compared for Plan S Authors

    Springer, Elsevier, Wiley and Taylor & Francis each run a free journal finder that matches a manuscript’s title, abstract or keywords to journals in their own portfolio — but none of them checks Plan S open-access compliance. That verification step belongs to cOAlition S’s separate Journal Checker Tool, which authors should run after shortlisting journals, not instead of it.

    A journal finder is a publisher-run search tool that recommends candidate journals for a manuscript by matching its subject area, title or abstract text against that publisher’s own list of active titles. This distinction matters more than it first appears: a Plan S-funded author who only uses a publisher’s finder can end up with a well-matched journal that is not, in fact, a compliant venue for their grant.

    What Do Publisher Journal Finder Tools Actually Do?

    Every major publisher-run journal finder performs the same core function: it takes a manuscript’s title, abstract or keywords and returns a ranked list of journals from that publisher’s own portfolio likely to fit the manuscript’s scope. None of them search across competing publishers, and none independently verify a journal’s open-access route against a specific funder’s mandate.

    • Input is usually a title, abstract or a short set of keywords, sometimes with a subject-area filter.
    • Output is a ranked shortlist, often annotated with impact metrics, acceptance rate or review speed.
    • Coverage is limited to titles the publisher itself owns or manages — this is the single biggest limitation for cross-publisher comparison shopping.

    How Do Springer, Elsevier, Wiley and Taylor & Francis Compare?

    Elsevier’s Journal Finder lets authors search by journal title, subject area or aims and scope, or run a “match my abstract” search against Elsevier’s own journal list. Springer Nature’s Journal Suggester, reached via the Springer Nature Link journals hub, matches manuscript details against the combined Springer, Nature, BMC and Palgrave Macmillan portfolio and surfaces open-access funding options alongside journal suggestions. Wiley’s Journal Finder states on its own page that it lets authors “search and filter across 1,800+ journals” by keyword, subject or abstract match. Taylor & Francis’s Journal Suggester, hosted on its Author Services site, uses a short five-question, AI-assisted form to recommend titles from the Taylor & Francis and Routledge list.

    Tool Provider Input method Portfolio scope Checks Plan S compliance? Best for
    Journal Finder Elsevier Title/abstract match, subject/scope search Elsevier’s own journals No Fast shortlisting within Elsevier imprints
    Journal Suggester Springer Nature Title, abstract or keyword input Springer, Nature, BMC, Palgrave Macmillan No (shows OA funding options, not funder-mandate checks) Authors targeting Springer Nature imprints
    Journal Finder Wiley Keyword, title or abstract search, with filters 1,800+ Wiley journals Partial — separate Wiley Author Compliance Tool checks funder policy Discipline-specific filtering within Wiley’s list
    Journal Suggester Taylor & Francis Five-question AI-assisted form Taylor & Francis / Routledge portfolio No Quick AI-generated shortlist
    Scopus Source Search Elsevier (Scopus) Lookup by ISSN or title, not manuscript matching Scopus-indexed sources, cross-publisher No Verifying CiteScore or indexing status of a journal already in mind
    Journal Checker Tool cOAlition S Funder, institution and journal input Any journal, cross-publisher Yes — this is its sole purpose Confirming a compliant open-access route before submission

    Does Scopus Have Its Own Journal Finder?

    Scopus, Elsevier’s abstract-and-citation database, does not run a manuscript-matching journal finder in the way Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley or Taylor & Francis do. Its Scopus Source Search instead looks up journals you already have in mind, by ISSN or title, to confirm indexing status and metrics such as CiteScore.

    Authors who search “journal finder scopus” are usually trying to do one of two different things, and conflating them causes wasted time. If the goal is to discover new candidate journals for a manuscript, a publisher’s own finder (or a cross-publisher tool such as JournalGuide) is the right starting point. If the goal is to confirm that a journal you have already chosen is Scopus-indexed, Scopus Source Search is the correct tool, not a substitute for journal discovery.

    Do Any of These Tools Check Plan S Compliance?

    Not directly, with one partial exception. Plan S, launched by cOAlition S in 2018 and taking effect for grants awarded from 2021, requires that publications from funded research appear in a fully open-access journal, on a compliant platform, or via a transformative arrangement recognised by the funder. Publisher journal finders match content to scope; they do not check a specific funder’s mandate against a specific journal’s business model.

    Wiley is the partial exception: alongside its Journal Finder, it offers a separate Author Compliance Tool that checks whether a given Wiley journal’s policies align with a named funder’s requirements. For every other publisher listed above, compliance checking sits outside the finder entirely.

    The authoritative cross-publisher tool is cOAlition S’s Journal Checker Tool (JCT). It requires three inputs — the author’s cOAlition S funder, their institution, and the intended journal — and returns whether that journal offers a Plan S-compliant route: full open access, a transformative agreement, or a self-archiving right that satisfies the funder’s policy. Authors should treat this as a mandatory second step after shortlisting journals with a publisher finder, never as an optional extra.

    Self-archiving (green open-access) rights specifically were historically checked via Sherpa/RoMEO. That lookup function has since migrated into Jisc’s Open Policy Finder, which now performs the same self-archiving and copyright policy search that Sherpa/RoMEO ran for over two decades, and remains a useful companion to the JCT when a transformative agreement is not available. Research administration teams tracking institutional compliance across multiple funders often run the JCT and Open Policy Finder together as a two-step check before an author submits.

    Common Questions From Plan S Authors

    Is Wiley JournalFinder free to use?

    Yes. Wiley’s Journal Finder is a free public tool at wiley.com that lets authors search or filter across 1,800+ Wiley journals by keyword, subject area or manuscript abstract. No login or subscription is required to generate a shortlist, though saving results and using the separate Author Compliance Tool may require a free Wiley account.

    What are the alternatives to Wiley Journal Finder?

    Authors publishing outside Wiley can use Elsevier’s Journal Finder, the Springer Nature Journal Suggester, or the Taylor & Francis Journal Suggester, each matching a manuscript to that publisher’s own portfolio. Cross-publisher alternatives include JournalGuide and Scopus Source Search, though neither replaces a funder-specific Plan S compliance check.

    What is Sherpa Romeo mainly used for?

    Sherpa/RoMEO was historically used to check a journal’s self-archiving policy — whether authors could deposit a preprint, accepted manuscript or published version in a repository. Its self-archiving data has since migrated into Jisc’s Open Policy Finder, which now performs the same green open-access policy lookup for Plan S authors.

    Is Wiley better than Elsevier?

    Neither is objectively “better” — each journal finder only searches that publisher’s own portfolio. Wiley’s tool covers 1,800+ titles with subject filters, while Elsevier’s adds an abstract-matching search across its list. The right choice depends on which publisher’s journals suit the manuscript’s discipline and the author’s funder requirements, not on the tool itself.

    For research administrators and institutional open-access teams, the practical takeaway is procedural rather than technical: publisher journal finders solve the discovery problem, but only a funder-aware checker like the JCT solves the compliance problem, and treating the two as interchangeable is the most common cause of post-acceptance compliance disputes. As more funders align with cOAlition S principles, expect publisher finders to integrate compliance flags directly — Wiley’s Author Compliance Tool is an early sign of that direction — but until that integration is universal, running a publisher finder followed by the Journal Checker Tool remains the safest two-step workflow for Plan S authors.

  • cOAlition S EU-Funded Projects: What Horizon Europe Grantees Must Still Do

    Search “cOAlition S EU-funded projects” and you land on a page that is easy to misread. It does not list the projects cOAlition S funds for grantees — it lists the European Commission grants that fund cOAlition S itself. That distinction matters for research administrators trying to work out which obligations actually attach to a Horizon Europe grant, and which belong to the separate, funder-driven Plan S mandate that the European Commission helped create.

    This piece reads that page on its own terms, then answers the practical question institutions actually have: given that the European Commission’s own Horizon Europe open access mandate already exists, where — if anywhere — does cOAlition S add anything a grantee still has to act on?

    What “EU-Funded Projects” Actually Lists on cOAlition S’s Site

    cOAlition S’s “EU-funded projects” resource page catalogues five Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 grants awarded to the European Science Foundation and partner consortia to build the infrastructure and evidence base around Plan S — it is not guidance aimed at individual grant recipients. Each entry names the funding call, the EU contribution, the duration and the coordinating institution.

    Project Funded under EU contribution Duration Coordinator
    OA-Advance HORIZON.4.2 €132,000 2024–2025 European Science Foundation (France)
    SOAR H2020-EU.5.e. €299,930 2020–2023 European Science Foundation (France)
    DIAMAS HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-43 €3,000,000 2022–2025 Aix-Marseille University (France)
    CRAFT-OA HORIZON-INFRA-2022-EOSC-01-02 €5,000,000 2023–2028 University of Göttingen Library (Germany)
    PALOMERA HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-ERA-01-42 €2,000,000 2023–2025 OPERAS (Belgium)

    The through-line is instructive: the European Commission is not a passive observer of Plan S. It is a funding partner for the studies (OA-Advance’s independent review of Plan S impact), tools (SOAR’s support for identifying compliant venues) and Diamond open-access infrastructure (DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA, PALOMERA) that keep the mandate operable. That funding relationship is the real answer to how cOAlition S and Horizon Europe are connected — and it is the fact most generic summaries of Plan S skip entirely.

    How cOAlition S and the Horizon Europe Mandate Overlap

    The European Commission is itself a cOAlition S member, alongside national funders including several that fund UK-based and other associated-country researchers, and the Horizon Europe open access mandate is, in substance, the Commission’s own implementation of Plan S principles inside its Model Grant Agreement. Both frameworks require:

    • Immediate open access to peer-reviewed publications, with no embargo period.
    • Deposit of the publication, or the accepted manuscript, in a trusted repository at the time of publication.
    • A Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, or equivalent, on journal articles and conference papers.
    • Author retention of sufficient rights to comply, regardless of what a publisher’s default policy allows.

    Because these baseline requirements are shared, a grantee who satisfies the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement’s open access clause will, in almost all cases, also satisfy Plan S. This is why cOAlition S materials describe Horizon Europe as an aligned implementation rather than a competing regime.

    Where cOAlition S Rules Still Add to the Horizon Europe Baseline

    Alignment is not identity. Three areas where the two frameworks are not simply interchangeable deserve attention from institutional research offices.

    Scope beyond the grant. Plan S is a funder mandate: it binds a researcher’s Plan-S-relevant output for as long as they hold funding from a cOAlition S member, not only the outputs tagged to a single Horizon Europe grant number. A researcher holding both a Horizon Europe grant and, say, a Wellcome or Research Council of Norway award is subject to the combined Plan S obligations of every cOAlition S funder involved — the Horizon Europe clause alone does not cover that.

    The compliance route. cOAlition S operationalises compliance through the Journal Checker Tool, which tells an author whether a specific journal, for their specific funder and affiliation, satisfies the mandate via the fully open access “Gold” route, a compliant transformative agreement, or the self-archiving Rights Retention Strategy route. The Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement states the requirement; the Journal Checker Tool is the operational instrument grantees actually use to verify a chosen venue — and it is a cOAlition S resource, not an EC one.

    Article Processing Charges in hybrid venues. Horizon Europe funding rules do not reimburse APCs for publishing in hybrid journals — subscription titles that also sell open access on a per-article basis — only in fully open access journals or platforms, including the Commission’s own Open Research Europe platform. Plan S’s broader principle is the same, but grantees who assume “my publisher offered an open access option” is automatically fundable frequently discover the hybrid exclusion applies regardless of which mandate they cite.

    Common Questions from Grantees

    What is an EU funded project?

    An EU-funded project is a research or coordination activity receiving a grant from a European Union programme such as Horizon Europe or its predecessor, Horizon 2020. In cOAlition S’s own case, five such projects — OA-Advance, SOAR, DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA — fund the coalition’s open access infrastructure and evidence base, not individual researchers’ compliance.

    Can the UK apply for EU funding?

    Yes. The UK re-associated to Horizon Europe from January 2024, meaning UK-based researchers can again apply for and hold Horizon Europe grants directly. UK recipients follow the same open access mandate as any other beneficiary, alongside any separate Plan S obligations from UK funders such as UKRI or Wellcome.

    Is cOAlition S the same body as the European Commission?

    No. cOAlition S is a voluntary alliance of national and private research funders, of which the European Commission is one member among roughly two dozen. The Commission sets Horizon Europe’s own grant conditions independently, but has aligned them closely with Plan S principles as part of that membership.

    Do Horizon Europe grantees need to follow Plan S separately from their grant agreement?

    Usually not in substance, since the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement already embeds Plan S’s core requirements. Grantees should still check Plan S obligations separately whenever a co-funder, prior grant, or institutional mandate outside Horizon Europe applies to the same publication.

    A Practical Compliance Checklist

    For research offices triaging a Horizon Europe-funded manuscript against both frameworks, the practical questions are the same regardless of which document a grant officer cites:

    1. Does the venue offer immediate open access with no embargo — checked directly, not assumed from the journal’s general reputation?
    2. Is a CC BY licence (or CC BY-NC / CC BY-ND for a monograph) applied to the published or accepted version?
    3. Has the author retained rights to deposit the accepted manuscript, independent of the publisher’s standard licence terms?
    4. If the venue is hybrid, has the team confirmed the APC is not eligible for reimbursement under Horizon Europe rules before committing funds?
    5. Do any other cOAlition S funders co-fund the same output, requiring a combined compliance check beyond the Horizon Europe grant alone?

    What This Means for Institutions

    The practical risk is not that Horizon Europe and Plan S conflict — it is that research offices treat “we’re Horizon Europe funded, so we’re covered” as a substitute for checking the venue, licence and co-funder picture on each output. Teams that build Journal Checker Tool and rights-retention verification into submission workflows, rather than relying on the Model Grant Agreement clause as a proxy, catch hybrid-APC and multi-funder edge cases before they become a post-award finding.

    For teams supporting research administration workflows across multiple funders, the EU-funded projects underpinning cOAlition S’s own infrastructure — particularly DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA’s work on Diamond open access publishing — are also worth tracking directly, since they signal where funder-preferred, no-fee publishing routes are likely to expand over the current Horizon Europe programming period.

    Outlook

    With DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA running through 2025 and 2028 respectively, and OA-Advance’s independent review due to feed recommendations on what comes after Plan S, the EU-funded projects on cOAlition S’s own page are best read as a forward signal rather than a static resource list. Institutions tracking them alongside their Horizon Europe grant terms — rather than treating the two frameworks as separate compliance tracks — will be better placed as Diamond open access infrastructure matures and funder mandates converge. CASRAI’s open research terminology reference provides further grounding for related definitions.

  • Plan S Journal Checker Tool: A Step-by-Step Compliance Guide

    What Is the Plan S Journal Checker Tool?

    The Plan S Journal Checker Tool (JCT) is a free, web-based service that lets an author check, in a single query, whether a chosen journal offers a compliant Open Access route under a specific funder’s Plan S-aligned policy. It was commissioned by cOAlition S, the international consortium of research funders behind Plan S, and built and maintained by Cottage Labs following a public tender in 2020. The tool went live for open community testing in November 2020 and has run continuously since.

    Unlike a generic journal-finder that matches a manuscript abstract to plausible venues, the JCT answers a narrower and more consequential question: given this journal, this funder and (optionally) this institution, does a compliant publishing route exist right now? That distinction matters because Plan S compliance is contractual — getting it wrong can put grant funding at risk.

    How to Use the Journal Checker Tool: A Step-by-Step Walkthrough

    The JCT’s compliance algorithm takes three inputs, only one of which is strictly required:

    • Journal (required) — identified by its ISSN; the search box also accepts journal titles and resolves them to an ISSN internally.
    • Funder (optional) — matched against a Crossref funder ID; omitting it still returns routes that do not depend on funder policy.
    • Institution (optional) — matched against a ROR (Research Organization Registry) identifier, used to surface institution-specific transformative agreements.

    In practice, the walkthrough looks like this:

    1. Go to journalcheckertool.org and enter the journal name or ISSN in the search field.
    2. Select the funder from the dropdown (only cOAlition S member funders are listed).
    3. Select the institution, or tick “No affiliation” if it does not appear or is not relevant.
    4. Run the check. The tool returns one of three outcomes for each applicable route: Compliant, Non-Compliant, or Unknown (insufficient data), each with a short audit trail explaining the decision.
    5. If more than one route is compliant, compare them — self-archiving is usually cost-free, while gold and transformative routes may carry an article processing charge (APC) or be covered by an institutional agreement.

    What happens if my funder is not listed in the Journal Checker Tool?

    If a funder does not appear in the tool’s dropdown, it is not a cOAlition S member and Plan S compliance rules do not apply to that grant. Authors should confirm current membership on cOAlition S’s published funder list before assuming no obligation exists for that award.

    What does a “Rights Retention” result mean?

    A Rights Retention result shows the funder has adopted the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy, so every journal has a compliance route: authors can self-archive the accepted manuscript under a CC BY licence, provided the mandated rights-retention statement is included in the submitted paper.

    Is the Transformative Journals route still checked by the tool?

    The tool’s TJ-Check algorithm still runs internally, but cOAlition S financial support for Transformative Journals ceased on 31 December 2024, following a January 2023 announcement that ended new applications. Authors and institutions should treat any TJ-based compliance result as historical rather than as current funding policy going forward.

    Can I check compliance without knowing my institution?

    Yes. If an institution is not listed, authors can tick the “No affiliation” checkbox and run the check on funder and journal alone, or search using the organisation’s ROR identifier, which the tool accepts directly in place of a full name match, avoiding acronym confusion.

    The Compliance Routes the JCT Checks

    The JCT’s back end runs a separate check for each of four defined routes to Plan S compliance. Not every route is available for every journal-funder-institution combination, and one route — Transformative Journals — is now effectively legacy.

    Route What it means Current status in the JCT
    Full/Gold Open Access Journal publishes all content OA immediately under a compliant licence (typically CC BY), often via an APC. Actively checked; primary route for fully OA journals listed in DOAJ.
    Self-Archiving (Green) Author deposits the accepted manuscript in a repository with no embargo, typically supported by the Rights Retention Strategy. Actively checked; available even when no other route applies, if the funder has adopted Rights Retention.
    Transformative Agreements (TA) Institution or consortium holds a “read and publish” deal, registered in the ESAC Registry, that converts subscription spend into OA publishing credits. Actively checked against the ESAC Registry; agreements are removed three months after they expire unless renewed.
    Transformative Journals (TJ) Hybrid/subscription journal previously committed to gradually increasing its OA share under a time-limited scheme. Algorithm still runs, but cOAlition S financial support and new TJ applications ended 31 December 2024.

    Where more than one route returns “Compliant,” the JCT does not rank them — it presents all valid options and leaves the choice to the author, since cost, speed and institutional agreements will differ.

    Where the Tool’s Compliance Data Comes From

    The JCT does not hold opinions of its own; it aggregates and caches data from several external, authoritative registries and refreshes them on a schedule:

    • DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) — the curated list used to identify fully Open Access journals and their licensing terms.
    • Crossref — supplies journal and funder metadata, including the Crossref Funder IDs used to match grants to policies.
    • ESAC Registry — the authoritative source for transformative agreements, including their start and expiry dates.
    • Journal Comparison Service (JCS) — a lesser-known component through which publishers voluntarily share journal-level price and service data; the list of participating publishers and covered years is published as an open CSV, even though the underlying price data itself sits behind a JCS account.
    • Shareyourpaper.org permissions data — informs self-archiving embargo and licence terms for the Green route.

    Because compliance results are only as good as the underlying registries, cOAlition S actively asks publishers to keep their DOAJ listings, ESAC agreements and JCS submissions current — an accuracy dependency that is easy to overlook when treating the JCT purely as a black-box checker.

    What This Means for Authors, Institutions and Publishers

    For authors, the practical takeaway is to run the check before submission, not after acceptance — a journal that looked compliant a year ago may have lost an expired transformative agreement, and a TJ-based result from 2024 no longer reflects live funder policy. The tool’s open, documented API (github.com/CottageLabs/jct) also means library systems, submission platforms and reference managers can embed live compliance checks rather than linking out.

    For research administration teams, the JCT’s audit trail is the useful artefact: it gives a defensible, timestamped record of why a route was judged compliant, which is valuable when reporting to funders or resolving a post-publication dispute.

    For publishers, the tool is a reminder that Plan S compliance is now infrastructure-dependent: a journal’s real-world eligibility rests on whether its DOAJ entry, ESAC agreement and JCS submission are current, not on the publisher’s own marketing claims of “Plan S compliant” status.

    The Outlook: JCT After the Plan S Review

    cOAlition S ran a formal review of Plan S’s requirements, effects and impact through 2024, alongside the scheduled wind-down of Transformative Agreement and Transformative Journal financial support at year end. That review is reshaping which routes funders will continue to recognise, and the JCT’s route-by-route architecture means it can retire or add compliance checks — as it did with TJ — without authors needing to learn a new interface. The practical implication is that the Journal Checker Tool, not any single funder policy page, remains the fastest way to get a current answer, and it is worth re-checking a journal even if it was confirmed compliant in a previous grant cycle.

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

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

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

    What Jisc open access agreements actually negotiate

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

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

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

    The three cOAlition S Plan S compliance routes

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

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

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

    Matching Jisc agreement types to each compliance route

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

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

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

    Common questions from UK research offices

    What is a read and publish deal?

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

    What are the three routes to Plan S compliance?

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

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

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

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

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

    A practical compliance checklist

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

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

    Implications for research offices

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

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

    Looking ahead

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