- What cOAlition S Actually Recommends for Monographs
- Timeline: How the Monograph Statement Emerged
- Licensing and Embargo Rules Compared Across Funders
- Where cOAlition S and Horizon Europe Overlap — and Diverge
- Implications for University Presses and Institutions
- What Comes Next
University presses tracking funder mandates often conflate two distinct policy layers. cOAlition S monographs guidance — the coalition-wide recommendations issued by the group of research funders behind Plan S — is not the same instrument as the Horizon Europe monograph mandate that already binds beneficiaries of European Commission grants. The two are related but legally and operationally distinct, and the gap matters for any press negotiating embargoes, licences, or rights-retention clauses with an academic author.
This explainer sets out what cOAlition S itself asks of its 20-plus funder members regarding academic books, how that differs from the binding Horizon Europe rules, and where university presses need to track both.
What cOAlition S Actually Recommends for Monographs
Plan S, launched in 2018, was built around Principle 7, which acknowledged that “the timeline to achieve Open Access for monographs and book chapters will be longer and requires a separate and due process” than for journal articles. cOAlition S formalised its position on academic books — defined broadly to include monographs, book chapters, edited collections, and critical editions — in a dedicated statement published on 2 September 2021.
Crucially, that statement is framed as a set of recommendations, not a uniform mandate. Individual cOAlition S organisations are asked to adopt the following within their own remits:
- Academic books based on funded original research should be made open access on publication.
- Authors or their institutions should retain sufficient intellectual property rights to enable open access and re-use.
- Books should be published under a Creative Commons licence.
- Embargo periods should be as short as possible and must never exceed 12 months.
- Funders should financially support open access book publishing through dedicated schemes.
This is a coordination framework, not a single rulebook. Each member funder — UKRI, Wellcome, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Science Foundation Ireland, and others — then writes its own policy inside those boundaries, which is precisely why embargo lengths and licence choices still vary from funder to funder.
Timeline: How the Monograph Statement Emerged
The gap between journal and book policy was deliberate, not an oversight. Plan S’s original 2018 principles applied in full to peer-reviewed journal articles from 1 January 2021, but books were explicitly carved out for a “separate and due process.” cOAlition S’s Implementation Guidance committed the coalition to issuing a books-specific statement “by the end of 2021” — a deadline it met with the September 2021 publication.
Since then, cOAlition S has continued developing technical guidance for open access books in collaboration with existing infrastructure providers, including the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN open access books toolkit, rather than imposing a single technical standard by decree.
Licensing and Embargo Rules Compared Across Funders
Because cOAlition S sets a ceiling rather than a fixed rule, the practical requirements a university press encounters depend entirely on which funder supported the underlying research. The table below compares the coalition-wide recommendation with several member funders’ actual policies, including the European Commission’s Horizon Europe rules.
| Funder / Framework | Scope | Maximum embargo | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| cOAlition S (coalition recommendation) | Academic books based on funded original research | 12 months | Any Creative Commons licence |
| Horizon Europe (European Commission) | All books, monographs and long-text outputs, if peer-reviewed | 0 months (immediate) | CC BY, CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC (or equivalent) |
| UKRI | Monographs, book chapters, edited collections (from 1 Jan 2024) | 12 months | Any Creative Commons licence |
| Wellcome | Scholarly monographs and book chapters | 6 months | CC BY preferred; other CC licences permitted |
| FWF (Austria) | Peer-reviewed research results of FWF-funded research | 12 months (only if FWF has not financially supported the book) | CC BY and CC BY-NC required |
| Research Council of Norway | Academic books, monographs, edited collections, anthology chapters | 12 months (immediate recommended) | CC BY, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC or equivalent |
The pattern is consistent: Horizon Europe is the strictest implementation of the cOAlition S framework, not a separate policy philosophy. As an EU funding programme whose managing body sits within cOAlition S, Horizon Europe simply exercises the option every member funder has — to set its own embargo and licence rules inside the coalition’s 12-month ceiling — and chooses the tightest possible setting: zero embargo.
Where cOAlition S and Horizon Europe Overlap — and Diverge
The overlap is principled: both frameworks require Creative Commons licensing, both expect rights retention sufficient to enable re-use, and both trace back to the same Plan S lineage. The divergence is procedural and binding. cOAlition S’s book statement is aspirational guidance that individual funders “will seek to adopt,” whereas the Horizon Europe rules sit inside the Model Grant Agreement that every beneficiary signs — making non-compliance a contractual, auditable matter rather than a best-practice lapse.
What is Plan S?
Plan S is an open access initiative launched in 2018 by cOAlition S, a group of national and international research funders. It requires immediate open access to peer-reviewed journal articles from funded research, with a separate, later-developed framework for monographs and book chapters.
Does cOAlition S require open access for monographs?
cOAlition S recommends rather than mandates open access for monographs. Its September 2021 statement asks member funders to adopt open access on publication, Creative Commons licensing, and a maximum 12-month embargo within their own policies — leaving each funder to set the binding rule.
How does the Horizon Europe monograph mandate differ from cOAlition S?
Horizon Europe imposes a binding, zero-embargo open access requirement for peer-reviewed monographs funded under the programme, embedded in its Model Grant Agreement. cOAlition S’s own statement is coalition-wide guidance permitting member funders up to a 12-month embargo, making Horizon Europe the strictest single implementation of that broader framework.
What licence does cOAlition S recommend for open access books?
cOAlition S recommends publication under any Creative Commons licence, without mandating a single variant. Horizon Europe narrows this for its own grantees to CC BY, CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC (or a licence with equivalent rights), reflecting the sector’s greater sensitivity around commercial and derivative rights for books than for journal articles.
Implications for University Presses and Institutions
For presses and library publishing units, the practical task is to identify the funder, not the coalition, before setting contract terms. A monograph funded partly by Horizon Europe money is bound by the zero-embargo rule regardless of what cOAlition S’s general statement permits; a monograph funded by an FWF grant that did not directly support book production may carry a 12-month embargo instead.
Several operational consequences follow:
- Contracts and rights-retention clauses should be drafted per funder, not per generic “Plan S compliance” assumption.
- Long-term data preservation and hosting arrangements matter as much as the embargo date — cOAlition S technical guidance points presses toward trusted infrastructure such as DOAB and OAPEN, mirroring the repository requirements it already sets for journal articles and datasets.
- Mixed-funding books (part Horizon Europe, part national funder) should default to the strictest applicable rule to avoid inadvertent non-compliance.
- Research administration teams should track funder-specific embargo tables rather than relying on a single “Plan S” checklist, since the coalition itself does not enforce one.
Institutions with dedicated research administration functions are best placed to reconcile these variations before contracts are signed, rather than after a book has gone to press. CASRAI’s broader work on funder compliance and research administration processes is directly relevant to teams building these internal checklists.
What Comes Next
cOAlition S has signalled it is moving toward a more flexible, multi-model approach to open access generally, following its own December 2025 strategy review — a shift chronicled by outlets including Chemistry World. For monographs specifically, this makes near-term convergence toward a single binding coalition-wide rule unlikely; the recommendation-based structure suits the genuine diversity of book publishing economics across disciplines and countries far better than a uniform mandate would.
University presses should therefore expect the current two-tier reality to persist: a coalition-wide floor of open access, Creative Commons licensing and a 12-month embargo cap, with individual funders — Horizon Europe most prominently — free to set stricter terms for their own grantees. Tracking both layers, rather than treating “Plan S” as one monolithic rule, remains the only reliable compliance strategy.