CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: Open Access Mandate

  • cOAlition S’s 2020 Open Access Pledge: What It Actually Delivered

    cOAlition S did not make full open access a reality by its original 2020 deadline: the target date slipped to 1 January 2021, and universal compliance was never achieved. But six years on, funder-mandated open access rose to roughly 80% among cOAlition S members against a ~60% global average, and the coalition’s November 2025 strategy for 2026-2030 now formally retires the transitional tools — transformative agreements — that got it there.

    Coalition S making open access a reality by 2020 was the literal title of the press release that launched cOAlition S on 4 September 2018. Plan S is the funder-led policy framework, built around ten principles, that requires publications from participating funders to appear immediately in compliant open access venues. This article measures that founding pledge against the evidence cOAlition S itself has since published, including its 2023 Annual Review and its 2026-2030 Strategy.

    What did cOAlition S actually pledge in 2018?

    cOAlition S launched on 4 September 2018 as a consortium of national research funders, backed by the European Commission and the European Research Council, built around Plan S. The founding press release stated the commitment without qualification: “By 2020 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.”

    That single sentence became the coalition’s defining test. It set an absolute deadline, a binary compliance standard, and no allowance for a phased transition. Eleven national funders signed at launch; the coalition’s own 2026-2030 strategy document now describes the founding cohort as twelve organisations, reflecting late additions before the ink dried.

    What has Plan S delivered since 2018?

    Plan S delivered a measurable, sustained rise in open access output among its funders, and it forced publishers to the negotiating table. It did not deliver the literal 2020 deadline, which the coalition itself extended by a year.

    According to cOAlition S’s Annual Review 2023, funders in the coalition have consistently maintained open access rates of approximately 80% for their supported research, compared with a global average of around 60%. An independent assessment, Galvanising the open access community: A study on the impact of Plan S (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13738479), credits cOAlition S with raising the profile of open access globally and pulling major publishers into transformative agreement negotiations they had previously resisted.

    Membership also grew far beyond the original European core. The coalition now counts 28 funders, spanning organisations in Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa and Australia, according to the cOAlition S Strategy 2026-2030 document.

    Where did the 2020 promise fall short?

    The 2020 deadline itself was the first casualty. Following sustained feedback from researchers and publishers, cOAlition S pushed implementation back to 1 January 2021, a full year after the date named in the founding pledge.

    Beyond timing, the mechanism used to hit the target created new problems. Plan S leaned heavily on Article Processing Charges and “read and publish” transformative agreements — deals in which institutions redirected subscription spending into publishing fees. This accelerated compliance but shifted cost from readers to authors, disadvantaging researchers at less-resourced institutions and smaller, society-run journals unable to negotiate comparable deals.

    • The original 1 January 2020 compliance date was never met as stated; it moved to 1 January 2021.
    • Compliance was achieved through paid publishing routes (APCs, transformative agreements) rather than the fee-free access the founding rhetoric implied.
    • cOAlition S formally ended financial support for transformative agreements and transformative journals from 31 December 2024, acknowledging the model’s limits.
    • Equity across regions and institution types remained unresolved, a gap the coalition’s own 2026-2030 strategy names directly.

    How does the 2026-2030 strategy change course?

    The cOAlition S Strategy 2026-2030, published 12 November 2025, is the coalition’s own evidence-based reckoning with the 2018 pledge. It does not claim victory; it explicitly reframes the goal around sustainability and equity rather than a single compliance date.

    The strategy sets three priorities, phased across an initial 2026-2027 period and a subsequent 2028-2030 period subject to review by the Leaders Group.

    Dimension 2018 founding pledge 2026-2030 strategy position
    Deadline 1 January 2020, unconditional No fixed date; phased two-stage implementation to 2030
    Membership 11-12 national funders plus EC/ERC support 28 funders across six regions
    Primary route Compliant OA journals/platforms, APC-driven Diamond OA, Publish-Review-Curate models, preprints
    Transformative agreements Actively funded as a transition tool Funding ended 31 December 2024
    Measured outcome Aspirational 100% compliance ~80% OA rate reported (2023 Annual Review) vs ~60% global average

    Science magazine characterised the new strategy as retreating from “strict requirements,” favouring alternatives to paywalled journals without an expressed goal of supplanting them entirely — a materially softer posture than the 2018 launch language.

    Common questions about Plan S’s track record

    Did Plan S achieve open access by 2020?

    No. cOAlition S extended its own deadline to 1 January 2021 after publisher and researcher feedback, and universal compliance was never reached. What Plan S did achieve was a sustained ~80% open access rate among its funders by 2023 — well above the global average, but short of the “full and immediate” pledge for all funded output.

    What happened to transformative agreements?

    cOAlition S stopped financially supporting transformative agreements and transformative journals from 31 December 2024. The 2026-2030 strategy redirects funder support toward diamond open access, Publish-Review-Curate models and preprints, treating transformative agreements as a transitional tool that had run its course rather than a permanent solution.

    How many funders belong to cOAlition S today?

    cOAlition S has grown from an initial 11-12 national funders in 2018 to 28 member organisations by 2025, now spanning funders in Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa and Australia, according to the coalition’s own 2026-2030 strategy document.

    What this means for funders, institutions and publishers

    Research funders modelling future open access mandates should treat the 2018-2020 episode as a case study in the gap between a compliance deadline and compliance reality. A hard date without an equity mechanism generates rapid but uneven adoption, concentrated among well-resourced institutions able to pay APCs.

    Institutions and research administration offices tracking funder mandates should note that transformative agreements are no longer a durable compliance route beyond 2024; budget planning should shift toward diamond and non-APC venues the 2026-2030 strategy now prioritises. Publishers, particularly smaller and society-run titles, gain a longer runway under the phased 2026-2027 and 2028-2030 structure than the original single-date ultimatum allowed.

    The verdict: catalyst, not completed reality

    cOAlition S’s 2018 pledge to make open access “a reality by 2020” was not literally kept. The deadline moved, the mechanism proved inequitable, and the coalition has now formally abandoned the tool that carried it furthest. What the pledge did deliver was momentum: an ~80% funder-level open access rate, a fourfold growth in membership, and a global policy conversation that persists into the 2026-2030 strategy. Judged as a compliance deadline, Plan S fell short. Judged as a catalyst for structural change in scholarly publishing, its six-year record is substantial, and its authors now say so themselves.

  • 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.

  • Is Plan S Open Access Working? A Sceptic’s Case for Differentiated Mandates

    Five years on from its 1 January 2021 compliance deadline, Plan S open access policy sits in an odd position: widely credited with putting open access on every funder’s agenda, yet quietly walked back by the very coalition that wrote it. An independent October 2024 review, Galvanising the Open Access Community: A Study on the Impact of Plan S, found the policy had a “game-changing” effect through its Rights Retention Strategy. But cOAlition S’s own 2026–2030 strategic plan tells a second story — one of phased retreat from the rigid, one-size-fits-all mandate it launched in 2018. That gap between celebratory retrospective and quiet course-correction is the real story, and it is worth asking plainly whether a blanket mandate was ever the right instrument.

    What Plan S Actually Requires

    Plan S was launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, an international consortium of national research funders and charitable foundations that includes UKRI and the Wellcome Trust. Its ten founding principles required that, from 2021, all peer-reviewed publications resulting from funding by coalition members be made immediately open access — either in a fully open access journal or platform, or via deposit in an open repository with no embargo.

    Two mechanisms did the heavy lifting:

    • The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), which lets funded authors apply a CC BY licence to their author-accepted manuscript regardless of the publisher’s own policy, enabling immediate green open access.
    • Article processing charges (APCs), the fee-based gold open access route, which cOAlition S initially agreed to fund on authors’ behalf where a compliant venue existed.

    Notably, the original ten principles were scoped to peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings. cOAlition S explicitly deferred a firm mandate for monographs and book chapters, citing the different funding cycles, peer-review norms, and licensing conventions of humanities and social-science (HSS) publishing — an early acknowledgement that a single rulebook does not fit every discipline.

    The Case Against the Blanket Mandate

    The criticisms of Plan S are not new, but they have hardened rather than faded. Three stand out.

    Cost-shifting to APCs. By pushing gold open access as the default compliant route, Plan S moved the cost of publishing from reader-side subscriptions to author-side fees. Well-resourced institutions and grant-rich disciplines absorb this easily; early-career researchers, unfunded scholars, and institutions in lower-income countries do not. Critics — including Science (AAAS), in its 2024 “mixed review” of the policy — have argued this risks a pay-to-publish stratification that Plan S was meant to dismantle, not recreate.

    Disciplinary disparities. STEM fields, with large grant budgets and a journal-article-centred publishing culture, adapted to Plan S’s timelines relatively smoothly. Fields with smaller grants, more diffuse funding, or monograph- and edited-volume-centred outputs did not. A mandate calibrated to biomedical and physical-science funding flows does not transfer cleanly to a discipline where the primary scholarly output is a single-author book written over several years.

    The humanities and monograph fit problem. Books remain the primary currency of career advancement in much of the humanities. Open access book publishing carries different cost structures (often higher per-unit costs than a journal article), different licensing sensitivities (image rights, third-party permissions, translated quotations), and a much thinner diamond and institutional-press ecosystem to absorb the volume. Applying a journal-shaped policy to a book-shaped discipline was, on the evidence of cOAlition S’s own deferred treatment of monographs, recognised as a mismatch from the outset — yet the underlying tension has never been fully resolved.

    Open access route How it works Typical discipline fit Cost burden cOAlition S’s current stance
    Gold (APC) Author or funder pays a publication fee for immediate open access STEM, grant-funded fields Shifted to authors/funders Supported, but flagged as unsustainable at scale
    Green (repository, via RRS) Author-accepted manuscript deposited under a retained CC BY licence Broad, including HSS Low direct cost Core mechanism, actively promoted
    Diamond (no author or reader fees) Community- or institution-funded journals/platforms Broad, especially HSS and society publishing Institutional/consortial funding Increasing emphasis in the 2026–2030 strategy
    Transformative agreements Institutions pay combined subscription-plus-publishing deals STEM-heavy, large-consortium markets High, opaque Support being phased out

    cOAlition S’s Own Retreat From Rigidity

    What makes the sceptic’s case harder to dismiss is that cOAlition S has, in effect, conceded much of it. The coalition’s published strategy for 2026–2030 signals a deliberate shift away from the rigid instruments of the 2018 launch:

    • Support for transformative agreements — once framed as a transitional bridge to full open access — is being wound down, an implicit admission that offsetting deals entrenched incumbent publishers’ revenue rather than transforming the market.
    • The strategy explicitly states that “no single model can meet all needs”, formally endorsing a plurality of routes (green, diamond, community-owned platforms) instead of privileging APC-funded gold.
    • Diamond open access — non-APC, non-subscription publishing typically funded by consortia, learned societies, or institutions — receives markedly more strategic weight than it did in 2018, partly because it fits humanities and society-publishing contexts that APC-gold never did.
    • Implementation timelines and compliance routes have been extended and softened repeatedly since 2021, a pattern of flexibility that was largely absent from the original ten principles.

    None of this is framed by cOAlition S as a repudiation of Plan S. But read against the criticisms above, it is difficult to interpret the 2026–2030 strategy as anything other than a coalition adjusting a blanket mandate toward the differentiated approach critics have been requesting since 2018.

    Common Questions About Plan S

    What is Plan S in open access?

    Plan S is an open access mandate launched in 2018 by cOAlition S, a coalition of national research funders including UKRI and the Wellcome Trust. It requires that peer-reviewed outputs from coalition-funded research be made immediately open access on publication, either through a compliant journal or platform, or via a no-embargo repository deposit.

    Do I have to pay for open access?

    Not necessarily. Gold open access typically involves an article processing charge (APC) paid by the author or funder. Green open access via repository deposit and diamond open access (no author or reader fees) are both compliant, fee-free alternatives that Plan S — and increasingly cOAlition S’s own strategy — actively supports.

    Toward Differentiated Funder Mandates

    The evidence points toward a specific policy design failure rather than a failure of open access as a goal. A single compliance clock, a single funding assumption, and a single default route (APC-gold) were applied across disciplines with radically different publishing economies. The fix is not to abandon open access mandates but to differentiate them:

    • Route-neutral compliance that treats green, diamond, and gold as equally valid by default, rather than gold-as-default with green as an exception.
    • Discipline-aware timelines, recognising that a monograph-based field cannot realistically match a journal-article field’s production cycle.
    • Direct funding for diamond infrastructure in HSS fields, rather than expecting APC markets to develop where publishing economics do not support them.
    • Transparent reporting on cost-shifting, so funders and institutions can see whether a mandate is redistributing cost fairly or simply moving it from library budgets to grant budgets.

    For research administration teams managing funder compliance day to day, this is not an abstract debate — differentiated mandates mean different checklists, different budget lines, and different risk profiles by discipline, and institutional policy needs to reflect that variation rather than applying one open access rulebook across every faculty.

    Conclusion: What Should Come Next

    Plan S succeeded at the one thing a blanket mandate is good at: forcing the issue onto every funder’s and publisher’s agenda within a few years, where voluntary encouragement had achieved comparatively little in the preceding two decades. It failed, or at least strained badly, at the thing blanket mandates are structurally bad at — accommodating disciplinary and economic diversity. cOAlition S’s own 2026–2030 strategic pivot toward plural, discipline-flexible routes is the clearest evidence that the coalition has reached the same conclusion. The sensible reading is not “Plan S failed” or “Plan S succeeded”, but that the next generation of funder mandates should be designed as differentiated instruments from the outset, rather than retrofitted into flexibility five years after a rigid launch.

  • 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.

  • Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies: A ROARMAP Guide for Research Administrators

    When a research office needs to check whether a funder requires immediate deposit or permits a twelve-month embargo, guesswork is not good enough. The registry of open access repository mandates and policies — known by its acronym ROARMAP — exists precisely to remove that guesswork. Maintained by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, it is a searchable, international catalogue of the open access mandates that universities, research institutions and funders have adopted, and it remains one of the few places where those policies can be compared side by side rather than tracked down one funder website at a time.

    This matters more in 2026 than it did a decade ago. Funder mandates have multiplied, cOAlition S members continue to refine Plan S implementation, and — as a June 2026 German constitutional ruling shows — even settled mandates can be challenged in court. Research administrators, library staff and compliance officers need a single reference point that tracks all of it. ROARMAP is that reference point.

    What ROARMAP catalogues, and why it matters

    ROARMAP began life in 2003 as the Institutional Archives Registry, built by the EPrints team at the University of Southampton. It was renamed the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies in 2006, then adjusted again, settling on its current name — Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies — around 2014. Throughout those renamings, its purpose stayed constant: track every publicly documented policy that requires or encourages researchers to make peer-reviewed outputs openly accessible, usually by depositing a copy in a repository.

    ROARMAP has a companion registry, ROAR (the Registry of Open Access Repositories), which indexes the repositories themselves rather than the policies that govern them. The distinction trips people up regularly, so it is worth setting out clearly alongside a third commonly confused resource, OpenDOAR.

    Registry What it indexes Typical use case
    ROARMAP Open access mandates and policies from institutions and funders Checking what a funder or institution requires
    ROAR Open access repositories themselves — location, size, growth Finding where a repository is hosted
    OpenDOAR Curated, vetted directory of repositories and their technical metadata Selecting a compliant repository to deposit into

    Entries in ROARMAP are not uniform in strength. Some record a simple recommendation to self-archive; others are mandatory policies where compliance is tied to continued grant funding — the sanction that gives a mandate real teeth. As of the last widely cited published count, ROARMAP had catalogued policies from more than 520 universities and over 75 research funders worldwide, a figure that has continued to grow as more institutions formalise their open access requirements.

    How cOAlition S members’ policies are catalogued

    cOAlition S is the group of research funders — including national funders, charitable foundations and the European Commission — that came together in 2018 to implement Plan S, the requirement that publicly funded research be made immediately open access without embargo. Because cOAlition S members are funders rather than repository operators, their individual mandates are exactly the kind of entry ROARMAP was built to hold.

    Each cOAlition S member’s policy is entered as a discrete record, so an administrator can look up, for example, what a specific national research council requires on licensing (typically CC BY), acceptable routes to compliance (Gold, Green with a zero-embargo repository deposit, or a transformative agreement), and how the policy interacts with the funder’s own compliance-monitoring tools, such as the Journal Checker Tool. Because ROARMAP predates Plan S by more than a decade, it also preserves the pre-2018 policy text for many of these funders, which is useful when institutions need to establish exactly when a requirement changed.

    This is a genuine information gain over simply reading each funder’s website individually: ROARMAP lets an administrator filter by funder type, country and adoption date, surfacing patterns — such as clusters of European funders tightening embargo terms in the same policy cycle — that are invisible from any single funder’s own page.

    Using the registry to compare institutional and funder mandates

    For day-to-day compliance work, ROARMAP is used less as a browsing tool and more as a lookup and benchmarking tool. A typical workflow for a research administrator looks like this:

    • Search by country or institution name to confirm whether a specific university has a formal mandate, and since when.
    • Filter by policymaker type — funder versus institution — to separate overlapping obligations on a single researcher.
    • Check the deposit timing and permitted embargo period recorded against each policy.
    • Note the required manuscript version — preprint, accepted manuscript or version of record.
    • Compare licensing requirements (commonly CC BY) where the policy specifies one.
    • Benchmark a draft institutional policy against comparable peer institutions before it goes to committee.

    This benchmarking use case is one of ROARMAP’s most practical applications. Rather than drafting an institutional open access policy from a blank page, a policy officer can pull several comparable universities’ mandates from the registry, line up their deposit windows and enforcement mechanisms, and use that comparison to justify the strength of a proposed new policy to institutional leadership.

    What is an open access repository?

    An open access repository is a freely accessible digital archive where researchers self-archive peer-reviewed articles, preprints or accepted manuscripts so readers can access them without a paywall. Universities run institutional repositories; funders and disciplines run subject-based ones. ROARMAP catalogues the policies requiring deposit — not the repositories themselves.

    How does OpenDOAR differ from ROARMAP?

    OpenDOAR is a curated directory listing vetted open access repositories and their technical characteristics, while ROARMAP lists the mandates and policies that require deposit into those repositories. Administrators typically use OpenDOAR to identify a compliant repository, then check ROARMAP to confirm whether deposit is compulsory and on what terms.

    What is self-archiving, and how do ROARMAP-listed policies define it?

    Self-archiving — the “Green” route to open access — means an author deposits a manuscript into a repository alongside, or instead of, publishing openly with a journal. Policies catalogued in ROARMAP typically specify the deposit timing, permitted embargo length, and which manuscript version satisfies the mandate.

    What are the drawbacks of relying on open access mandates?

    Mandates catalogued in registries such as ROARMAP vary widely in enforcement: some merely encourage deposit while others tie compliance to grant payment. Weak or unmonitored policies show low actual deposit rates, embargo terms conflict across funders, and legal challenges — as seen in Germany in 2026 — can unsettle even long-established mandates.

    What the changing legal landscape means for research administrators

    ROARMAP’s value is not static, and 2026 has already supplied a reminder of why. In June, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court struck down a state-level bylaw at the University of Konstanz that would have compelled researchers to exercise their statutory secondary-publication right — ruling that regulating copyright through employment or institutional statute conflicted with the federal government’s exclusive legislative competence over copyright law. The University of Konstanz noted afterwards that the ruling changed little in practice, because the great majority of its researchers already deposit voluntarily. But the case is a useful illustration for administrators elsewhere: a mandate’s formal status, its legal basis and its actual compliance rate can diverge, and a registry entry captures only the first of those three.

    That gap between formal mandate and practical uptake is exactly why registries such as ROARMAP function as compliance infrastructure rather than mere reference material. Institutions revising their own open access policy — whether to align with cOAlition S requirements, respond to a national research assessment exercise, or pre-empt a legal challenge — need a documented, dated record of what comparable institutions and funders actually require, not an assumption based on the last policy a colleague happened to read. For a wider view of how these obligations sit alongside contributorship and compliance frameworks more broadly, CASRAI’s research administration resources and dictionary of research terms provide further grounding.

    As funder policies continue to tighten and jurisdictions test the legal limits of mandated deposit, expect ROARMAP’s role to shift from a static archive towards a living reference that research offices consult routinely, alongside compliance checkers and repository directories, whenever a grant agreement, tenure case or institutional policy review depends on knowing exactly what an open access mandate actually requires.

  • Budapest Open Access Initiative vs Plan S: Comparing Two Open Access Blueprints

    The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and Plan S are the two documents most frequently invoked when someone asks “what does open access actually require?” — yet they answer that question in almost opposite ways. BOAI is a voluntary declaration of principle from 2002; Plan S is a binding funder mandate from 2018. Readers arriving from searches around cOAlition S often want to know which framework applies to their situation, and why the two differ so sharply in enforceability. This piece sets out both, side by side, with the dates, mechanisms and licensing terms that distinguish them.

    What is the Budapest Open Access Initiative?

    BOAI arose from a small meeting the Open Society Institute convened in Budapest on 1-2 December 2001, and the resulting statement was released publicly on 14 February 2002. It was funded by a US $3 million grant from the Open Society Institute and signed initially by 16 individuals, including Peter Suber, Stevan Harnad, Michael Eisen and Jean-Claude Guédon — figures who went on to shape the wider open access movement.

    The declaration gave one of the first widely used definitions of open access: free availability on the public internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link to, or text-mine the full text, with the only constraint being authors’ right to control the integrity of their work and be properly credited.

    • Green open access: authors self-archive a copy of their peer-reviewed paper in an open repository.
    • Gold open access: journals publish articles openly from the outset, funded by means other than reader subscriptions.

    BOAI does not mandate either route, set a deadline, or monitor compliance. Its 10th-anniversary statement (2012) added a recommendation for CC BY licensing and repository infrastructure; its 20th-anniversary update (BOAI20, 2022) issued four high-level recommendations for the next decade. By 2023, over 6,800 individuals and 1,600 organisations had signed it. Alongside the 2003 Berlin Declaration and Bethesda Statement, BOAI is one of the three founding texts of the open access movement.

    What is Plan S?

    Plan S was launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, a group of national and international research funders including UKRI, several European research councils, and the European Commission. Unlike BOAI, Plan S is a mandate: it requires that, for research funded from 2021 onwards, resulting peer-reviewed publications must be made immediately open access — in a compliant journal, on a compliant platform, or via an open repository — with no embargo.

    Plan S sets out ten principles covering licensing, author rights and cost transparency. Its most consequential requirements are:

    • Open licensing — publications must carry an open licence, preferably CC BY.
    • Rights retention — authors or their institutions retain copyright rather than transferring it to the publisher.
    • No pure hybrid support — cOAlition S will not fund publication in subscription journals that offer paid open access options, except within time-limited transformative agreements.
    • Fee transparency — where article processing charges apply, they must be disclosed and justified.

    Because Plan S is tied to funding conditions, compliance is checked, and non-compliant publications can put a researcher’s funding eligibility at risk — a mechanism BOAI simply has no equivalent of.

    BOAI vs Plan S: a side-by-side comparison

    Feature Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) Plan S
    Launched 14 February 2002 4 September 2018
    Originator Open Society Institute-convened group of individuals cOAlition S (national/international research funders)
    Nature Voluntary declaration of principle Binding funder mandate
    Enforcement None — moral/advocacy suasion only Tied to grant funding conditions
    Preferred routes Green (self-archiving) and gold (OA journals) Compliant journal, platform, or repository, no embargo
    Licensing Not prescribed (CC BY recommended from 2012) Open licence required, CC BY preferred
    Implementation deadline None set Applied to research funded from 2021

    Key differences explained

    The clearest way to read the two documents is as different stages of the same movement. BOAI supplied the definition and the philosophical case for open access; Plan S supplied a compliance mechanism to accelerate uptake once voluntary adoption plateaued. Two decades on from BOAI, much subscription-journal literature remained closed, which is precisely the gap cOAlition S funders set out to close by attaching conditions to their money rather than relying on persuasion.

    A second difference is scope. BOAI addresses the entire scholarly community — researchers, institutions, publishers, governments — as a universal statement. Plan S applies specifically to researchers funded by cOAlition S members, so its reach is defined by funder membership rather than by field or geography.

    Common questions, answered

    What is the Budapest Open Access Initiative concerned with?

    The Budapest Open Access Initiative is concerned with making peer-reviewed research literature freely available online, without financial or legal barriers, so anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, or text-mine it, subject only to authors’ right to be properly acknowledged.

    What is the history of BOAI?

    BOAI emerged from a meeting the Open Society Institute convened in Budapest on 1-2 December 2001, was released publicly on 14 February 2002, and was followed by 10th-anniversary (2012) and 20th-anniversary (2022) recommendation updates.

    In which year did the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration take place?

    The Budapest meeting took place in December 2001, and the resulting declaration was formally released to the public on 14 February 2002, making it one of the founding texts of the open access movement.

    What is the difference between BOAI and Plan S?

    BOAI is a voluntary statement of principle with no enforcement mechanism, while Plan S is a binding funder mandate from cOAlition S requiring immediate open access, specific licensing, and compliance monitoring for funded outputs.

    What this means for institutions, researchers and publishers

    For research administrators, the practical takeaway is that BOAI and Plan S sit at different points of an institutional compliance stack. BOAI-aligned green open access — depositing a copy in an institutional or subject repository — remains a low-cost baseline that satisfies neither Plan S’s no-embargo rule nor its licensing requirement on its own, but supports discoverability and long-term preservation regardless of funder.

    Publishers navigating both frameworks typically need:

    • A CC BY (or equivalent open) licensing option at the article level.
    • A rights-retention pathway that does not require copyright transfer.
    • Transparent, itemised article processing charges where fees apply.
    • Repository-compatible metadata so green deposits can satisfy funder checks.

    Institutions should treat BOAI’s language as the shared vocabulary of open access policy — it is what most local and national OA policies still cite when defining terms — while treating Plan S (and successor funder mandates modelled on it) as the specific compliance checklist that determines whether a given grant-funded output is audit-ready.

    Two blueprints, one destination

    BOAI and Plan S are not competitors; they are sequential milestones in the same movement toward open scholarly communication. BOAI defined what open access means and why it matters; Plan S demonstrated what happens when funders convert that definition into a binding condition of grant compliance. Institutions that understand both — the founding principles and the enforcement mechanism layered on top — are better placed to build policies that satisfy funder mandates without losing sight of the broader access mission BOAI first articulated in 2002.

    Research-administration teams working across CRediT contributor roles, authorship policy, and funder compliance can find related terminology in the CASRAI Dictionary and further context in the research administration pillar.

  • What Is cOAlition S? A Guide to the Funder Coalition Behind Plan S

    What Is cOAlition S? (Quick Answer)

    So, what is cOAlition S? It is an international consortium of research funding and research-performing organisations that launched on 4 September 2018 to accelerate full and immediate open access to publicly funded research. It was announced jointly by a group of national research funders, with the backing of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), and was co-initiated by Marc Schiltz, then President of Science Europe, and Robert-Jan Smits, at the time the European Commission’s Open Access Envoy.

    cOAlition S does not itself publish research or set library policy. It is the funder-side alliance that authored, endorses and operationally enforces a single open-access policy framework known as Plan S. Understanding that split — a coalition of institutions on one side, a compliance mandate on the other — is the single most useful fact for anyone trying to interpret a funder’s open-access requirements.

    cOAlition S vs Plan S: Why the Distinction Matters

    The two names are often used interchangeably in casual conversation, but they refer to different things. cOAlition S is a group of organisations; Plan S is the policy those organisations agreed to implement. Confusing the two leads to real compliance errors — for example, assuming that a funder is bound by Plan S because it is described alongside cOAlition S in a news article, when in fact membership and mandate adoption are two separate steps.

    Aspect cOAlition S Plan S
    What it is A consortium of funding and research-performing organisations A policy framework of one target and ten principles
    Launched 4 September 2018 4 September 2018 (announced alongside cOAlition S)
    Function Governs, funds and enforces the mandate Defines what “full and immediate open access” requires
    Core requirement Not applicable — the coalition is the implementing body Publications from funded research must appear in an open-access journal, platform or repository without embargo
    Who it binds Member funders, who then bind their grant-holders Researchers funded by a cOAlition S member, once that funder adopts the policy

    In short: if a researcher asks “does Plan S apply to my grant?”, the answer depends on whether their funder is a cOAlition S member and has implemented the policy in its grant conditions — not simply on whether the funder is mentioned in Plan S coverage.

    Origins, Governance and Membership

    cOAlition S grew out of frustration among European funders that voluntary open-access recommendations were not shifting publisher behaviour fast enough. The founding principle, published on launch day, states:

    “With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.”

    Membership expanded steadily after the 2018 launch. By its five-year anniversary in September 2023, cOAlition S had grown from around a dozen founding funders to a network of 28 funders spanning Europe and beyond. Notable participants and supporters over the years have included:

    • UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
    • Wellcome Trust (joined November 2018)
    • Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (joined November 2018)
    • Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
    • Academy of Finland
    • Research Council of Norway
    • Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)
    • National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia (NHMRC)

    Governance has not been static. The European Research Council backed cOAlition S at launch in 2018 but withdrew its formal support in July 2020, while remaining aligned with open-access goals more broadly — a reminder that “coalition member” status can change even after a funder has publicly endorsed the framework. cOAlition S’s day-to-day secretariat function has also evolved; the organisation operates under the European Science Foundation’s science-policy-support activities and has continued to update its operating structure, including a new strategy for 2026–2030 published in November 2025.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is Plan S?

    Plan S is the open-access policy framework created and endorsed by cOAlition S. It requires that, from 2021, all peer-reviewed publications resulting from grants awarded by a participating funder be made immediately and freely available, without embargo, in a compliant open-access journal, platform or repository.

    What does the “S” in Plan S stand for?

    According to Robert-Jan Smits, the plan’s chief architect, the “S” stands for “shock” — reflecting the coalition’s intent to jolt scholarly publishing into a faster transition to open access, rather than relying on the slower, voluntary approach that had dominated the previous two decades.

    How many funders belong to cOAlition S?

    Membership has grown considerably since 2018. cOAlition S expanded from roughly a dozen founding funders to a network of 28 funders by its five-year anniversary in September 2023, and the coalition continues to invite public and private research funders worldwide to join.

    Is cOAlition S a government body?

    No. cOAlition S is not a government agency; it is a voluntary alliance of research funders — national funding councils, the European Commission, and charitable foundations such as Wellcome Trust — that have agreed to coordinate their own grant conditions around a shared open-access target.

    Why the Distinction Matters for Compliance

    For research administrators, institutional open-access librarians and grants offices, the cOAlition S / Plan S distinction is not academic. Compliance obligations attach at the funder level, not automatically at the field or discipline level. Two practical consequences follow.

    • Check the funder, not the field. A researcher can work in a Plan S-adjacent discipline and still have no Plan S obligation, because their specific funder has not joined cOAlition S or has not yet implemented the policy in its own grant terms.
    • Track transitional allowances separately from the core mandate. During the transition period, Plan S permits publication in “transformative journals” — hybrid titles covered by an agreement to convert fully to open access — which sit outside the strict letter of the core principle but remain compliant under cOAlition S guidance.

    Because cOAlition S retains the authority to revise implementation guidance — including its Rights Retention Strategy, which lets funded authors apply a CC BY licence to the author’s accepted manuscript regardless of a publisher’s own policy — institutions need to monitor cOAlition S announcements directly rather than relying solely on secondary summaries.

    Looking Ahead: cOAlition S in 2026

    Plan S is often described in retrospective terms, as though the 2021 deadline closed the story. It did not. cOAlition S published a new strategy covering 2026–2030 in November 2025, signalling continued activity around rights retention, diamond open access and equitable publishing models rather than a wind-down. For institutions still mapping which of their funders carry a live Plan S obligation, the coalition’s own organisations page remains the authoritative, continuously updated source — far more reliable than any static list, including this one.

    Research administrators managing multi-funder compliance can pair that funder-by-funder check with CASRAI’s broader research administration resources for context on how open-access mandates fit within the wider compliance landscape institutions now navigate.

  • cOAlition S Scales Back: Inside the Open Access Commitment Reset

    On 12 November 2025, cOAlition S published a statement titled “cOAlition S reinforces Open Access commitment while advancing next strategic phase.” The framing was affirmative, but the substance was a retreat. The cOAlition S open access commitment for 2026-2030 drops the all-funder compliance mandate that defined Plan S since 2018 in favour of three broader, less prescriptive priorities — and December 2025 trade coverage, including Chemistry World, read the move for what it is: a narrowing of ambition after seven years of uneven enforcement.

    For research administrators who built compliance workflows, journal-checker integrations, and funder-reporting templates around the original all-or-nothing mandate, this is not a footnote. It is a structural change in what “Plan S compliant” means going forward.

    What cOAlition S actually announced in November 2025

    cOAlition S — the international consortium of research funders formed in 2018, coordinated through Science Europe — published its Strategy 2026-2030 alongside the November statement. Mari Sundli Tveit, Chief Executive of the Research Council of Norway and Chair of the cOAlition S Leaders Group, said the coalition remains “determined to accelerate full and immediate Open Access,” while explicitly widening the mission to include transparency, equity, and the trustworthiness of scientific knowledge.

    Three strategic priorities now anchor the plan:

    • Strengthening the foundations for full, immediate, sustainable, and equitable open access to peer-reviewed scholarly articles.
    • Supporting the digital infrastructure that underpins open access publishing.
    • Exploring financially sustainable, equitable publishing systems while monitoring their progress and impact.

    Notably, the statement does not repeat the 2018 promise of a single, enforced compliance deadline for all member funders. Instead it describes “extensive member consultation” and implementation that will “unfold collaboratively over the following months” — language that signals coordination rather than a mandate with teeth.

    Plan S 2018 versus the 2026-2030 strategy: what changed

    Plan S launched in September 2018 with twelve founding funders and a hard requirement: from 2021, all peer-reviewed publications resulting from grants awarded by cOAlition S members had to appear in fully open access journals or platforms, or be deposited immediately in a repository without embargo, under a CC BY licence. It was designed as an all-or-nothing mandate — no partial credit, no member opt-outs on the core requirement.

    The clearest concrete break in the 2026-2030 strategy is the end of coalition-wide financial support for “transformative arrangements” (read-and-publish and similar hybrid-journal deals), which member funders had already agreed to stop funding after 2024. Those agreements were originally sold as a bridge to full open access; cOAlition S’s own strategy materials now treat their expiry as settled, while the harder question — what replaces them at scale — is deferred to the “exploring financially sustainable, equitable publishing systems” priority rather than answered outright.

    Dimension Plan S (2018 launch) cOAlition S Strategy 2026-2030
    Compliance model Single mandatory deadline (2021) for all member-funded outputs Coordinated priorities, member-level implementation timelines
    Core licence requirement CC BY, no embargo Unchanged — still CC BY, no embargo, where applicable
    Transformative agreements Tolerated as a temporary bridge Coalition funding ended after 2024
    Scope of mission Full and immediate open access Adds transparency, equity, trustworthiness, AI-era research integrity
    Governance framing Uniform mandate across members “Diverse national and international contexts,” unified advocacy rather than enforcement

    What has not changed, per cOAlition S’s own materials: the underlying licensing requirement (CC BY, no embargo) still applies where a member funder’s policy invokes it. What has changed is the coalition-level machinery that once stood behind that requirement as a shared, enforced deadline.

    What enforcement looks like now

    The 2018 model relied on a shared Journal Checker Tool, coordinated funder policies, and the implicit threat of a synchronised 2021 deadline across all members. The 2026-2030 model relies instead on individual funder policies operating inside a shared strategic direction — each cOAlition S member (among them UKRI, the Wellcome Trust, and the European Commission via Horizon Europe) continues to set and enforce its own grant conditions, but the coalition itself is stepping back from presenting those conditions as a single synchronised mandate.

    This is a meaningful distinction for anyone doing compliance work:

    • Funder-level open access requirements (UKRI’s policy, Horizon Europe’s Open Research mandate, Wellcome’s policy) remain in force and are not softened by the coalition statement.
    • What is softened is the coalition-wide narrative that all of this adds up to one enforced standard with one compliance bar.
    • Institutions should expect continued policy divergence between funders rather than the convergence Plan S originally promised.

    Common questions about the open access commitment

    What is Plan S in open access?

    Plan S is the 2018 open access mandate from cOAlition S requiring that peer-reviewed publications funded by member grants be made immediately available, without embargo, under a CC BY licence — either via a compliant open access venue or an institutional repository.

    Has cOAlition S dropped its open access mandate?

    No — cOAlition S has not dropped the underlying licensing requirement. What changed is the coalition-level enforcement model: the Strategy 2026-2030 replaces a single all-funder compliance deadline with three broader strategic priorities and funder-level implementation.

    Who are the cOAlition S funders?

    cOAlition S launched in 2018 with twelve national and international research funders and has since grown; current members include research councils and funding bodies coordinated through Science Europe, alongside participants such as the European Commission via Horizon Europe. Membership composition is published on coalition-s.org.

    Are transformative agreements still funded under Plan S?

    No. cOAlition S member funders confirmed the end of financial support for transformative arrangements such as read-and-publish deals after 2024, treating them as an expired transitional measure rather than a permanent open access route.

    Implications for institutional compliance workflows

    Institutions that built compliance infrastructure — journal-checker integrations, repository deposit workflows, funder-reporting dashboards — around the assumption of one synchronised cOAlition S standard now need to re-map that infrastructure to individual funder policies. The practical risk is not that requirements have loosened; UKRI, Wellcome, and Horizon Europe policies are each still active and still require licence and embargo compliance on their own terms. The risk is assuming coalition-level messaging still functions as a single compliance proxy for all of them.

    Research offices should treat the 2026-2030 strategy as a signal to audit funder policies individually rather than defer to a “Plan S compliant” shorthand that no longer maps cleanly onto one enforced standard. That audit work sits alongside related contributor-transparency and authorship-attribution practices that institutions are already tracking — for example through the CRediT contributor role taxonomy, which CASRAI originated in 2014 and which is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and through broader research administration compliance frameworks.

    The next twelve months matter. cOAlition S has said implementation of the new strategy will “unfold collaboratively” — which means the concrete compliance detail research offices actually need (updated guidance, any revised Journal Checker Tool logic, member-by-member timelines) is still being written. Institutions that wait for a single unified answer, as they could under the 2018 framing, are likely to be waiting through most of 2026. The more defensible posture is to track each funder’s policy directly and treat the coalition strategy as directional context rather than an enforceable standard in its own right.

  • Plan S Compliance in 2026: A Practical Checklist for Research Administrators

    Seven years after cOAlition S launched Plan S, Plan S compliance has moved from a policy novelty to a routine administrative discipline — but “routine” does not mean simple. As institutions head into the 2026 reporting cycle, research offices are still fielding basic questions from principal investigators about which of the three compliance routes applies to a given grant, and grant management systems still struggle to capture licensing metadata in a form that survives an audit. This piece sets out a practical checklist for research administrators responsible for demonstrating Plan S compliance across UKRI, Wellcome, ERC and NWO-funded outputs.

    The underlying policy has not changed dramatically since its 2018 launch, but its operational surface has. Publishers have consolidated transformative agreements, rights-retention strategies have become the default route for many UK institutions, and funders have tightened monitoring of self-archived manuscripts in approved repositories. The compliance burden has therefore shifted from “which journal did they publish in” to “can we produce the metadata trail to prove the route taken.”

    The Three Plan S Compliance Routes

    cOAlition S — the international consortium of research funders, including UKRI, Wellcome, the European Commission (via Horizon Europe), and several national funders — defines three routes by which a funded output can satisfy Plan S requirements. Every research administrator building a compliance workflow needs a clear internal definition of each.

    • Gold open access route: publication in a fully open access journal or platform, or an open access article within a hybrid journal covered by a transformative agreement, with a compliant licence (typically CC BY) applied immediately on publication.
    • Rights retention route: the author applies a prior licence — usually CC BY — to the accepted manuscript at submission, informing the publisher that a funder mandate requires this. This route has become the default mechanism recommended by UKRI and several other cOAlition S members precisely because it does not depend on publisher cooperation or subscription negotiations.
    • Approved repository route: the author deposits the accepted manuscript (or, where permitted, the version of record) in an institutional or subject repository that meets cOAlition S technical requirements, with no embargo beyond what the funder allows — in most current cOAlition S policies, this means immediate deposit with a compliant licence, not a delayed embargo.

    The critical administrative point is that these routes are not mutually exclusive fallbacks chosen in sequence; they are three parallel doors, and the appropriate one often depends on the venue the researcher has already selected, the transformative agreement coverage at the institution, and the specific funder’s guidance on acceptable embargo periods.

    Funder-Specific Variations Research Offices Must Track

    Although cOAlition S coordinates a shared framework, individual funders retain discretion over enforcement mechanisms, grace periods and sanctions — and these variations are where most non-compliance actually occurs.

    UKRI

    UKRI’s open access policy, which applies to research articles submitted for publication from awards made after its 2022 implementation date, requires immediate open access with a CC BY licence for journal articles, and has extended equivalent requirements to monographs, book chapters and edited collections from 2024. UKRI has been explicit that rights retention is an acceptable and encouraged mechanism, and it does not permit publisher embargoes on journal articles funded under its policy.

    Wellcome

    Wellcome operates one of the more prescriptive policies within cOAlition S: it requires immediate open access with a CC BY licence (or CC BY-ND in limited circumstances) for all research articles, and — notably — it will not pay article processing charges to journals that do not offer a compliant open access route, pushing many Wellcome-funded authors towards rights retention or fully open venues.

    ERC (Horizon Europe)

    The European Research Council, funding under Horizon Europe, requires immediate open access to peer-reviewed publications with no embargo, and mandates deposit of the underlying data in line with FAIR principles where feasible. ERC compliance monitoring is integrated into Horizon Europe’s broader open science requirements, meaning research offices supporting ERC grant holders must track both publication and data-deposit obligations together, not as separate workstreams.

    NWO

    The Dutch Research Council (NWO) aligns closely with the original Plan S text and has been an active proponent of rights retention across Dutch universities, working alongside national consortia to secure publisher acknowledgement of the strategy. Administrators supporting NWO-funded researchers should note that Dutch institutional agreements often pre-negotiate compliance at the consortium level, reducing the burden on individual grant holders but increasing the importance of confirming which agreements are actually in force for a given journal at the time of submission.

    Recording Compliance in Grant Management Systems

    The most persistent operational gap is not policy interpretation but data capture. Many grant management systems were built around financial and reporting milestones, not licensing metadata, and research offices frequently discover compliance gaps only at final report stage — too late to correct.

    • Capture the compliance route at submission, not at publication. Ask researchers to record their intended route (gold, rights retention, or repository) when they submit a manuscript, not retrospectively when compiling a funder report.
    • Store the rights-retention statement text used. If a researcher applies a rights-retention statement to a submitted manuscript, the exact wording and date should be logged against the grant record, since this is the evidence a funder will request.
    • Link repository deposit records to grant identifiers. Persistent identifiers — ORCID for the researcher, DOI for the output, and a funder or grant reference — should be cross-referenced in both the institutional repository and the grant management system so a single query can reconstruct the compliance trail.
    • Flag embargo periods against funder-specific rules. A generic “12-month embargo” field is not sufficient when UKRI and ERC require zero embargo on journal articles while other, non-cOAlition S funders may still permit longer delays; systems should record the applicable policy alongside the embargo value.
    • Audit transformative agreement coverage separately from author self-report. Publisher-reported compliance data under transformative agreements does not always match what the researcher believes was agreed; reconciling the two periodically catches errors before final reporting.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    The practical effect of seven years of Plan S implementation guidance is that compliance has become a metadata management problem as much as a policy one. Research offices that treat rights retention, repository deposit and licensing decisions as data to be captured at the point of submission — rather than reconstructed at reporting time — spend far less effort on remediation. Given that cOAlition S funders increasingly cross-reference ORCID records, repository metadata and publisher reporting, discrepancies are becoming easier to detect, which raises the cost of poor record-keeping.

    Institutions should also expect continued divergence rather than convergence among individual funder policies. UKRI’s extension of open access requirements to long-form outputs, Wellcome’s refusal to fund non-compliant APCs, and the ERC’s integration of publication and data mandates all point towards funder-specific detail becoming more important, not less, even as the shared cOAlition S framework remains stable.

    Looking Ahead

    As the Plan S open access framework matures alongside broader European and UK open science policy, research administrators should treat compliance recording as core grants infrastructure rather than a compliance afterthought. Institutions that build ORCID-linked, funder-policy-aware metadata capture into their grant management systems now will be better placed to respond as funders sharpen enforcement and as monitoring increasingly relies on machine-readable evidence rather than self-declaration.

  • Plan S and the Transition to Open Access: Deciphering the Rights Retention Strategy

    Introduction

    Plan S, launched in 2018 by cOAlition S—a consortium of international research funders—represents one of the most disruptive open-access mandates in scholarly history. It requires that all scientific publications resulting from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms from the outset. A core pillar of this policy is the Rights Retention Strategy, which empowers authors to retain their copyrights and self-archive their manuscripts without embargo.

    The Mechanics of the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS)

    The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) is designed to bypass the traditional copyright transfer agreements that publishers impose on authors. Under RRS, authors apply a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license to their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM). By doing so, they can deposit the AAM in an institutional repository immediately upon publication, ensuring immediate green open access even if the article is published in a subscription-based journal. This strategy effectively shifts the legal leverage from the commercial publisher back to the researcher and their funding body.

    Funder Compliance and the Challenge of Hybrid Journals

    A central tension within Plan S is its treatment of hybrid journals—subscription journals that offer an open-access option for an additional fee. Plan S explicitly states that funders will not support APCs in hybrid journals unless they are part of a formal ‘transformative agreement’ (such as read-and-publish deals). This restriction forces institutions to rapidly negotiate country-wide transformative agreements, shifting library budgets from subscriptions to systemic open-access support.

    Publisher Pushback and Legal Landscapes

    Major scholarly publishers have responded to RRS with administrative and legal counter-measures. Some have updated their submission terms to prohibit the application of immediate open licenses to submitted manuscripts, creating a legal conflict for researchers caught between publisher terms and funder mandates. Addressing this friction requires institutional legal offices to declare pre-existing rights policies that take precedence over publisher copyright agreements.

    Key Evaluation and Interoperability Matrix

    Compliance Pathway Description Author Copyright Status Funder Financial Support
    Gold Open Access Publishing directly in a fully Open Access journal or platform. Author retains copyright (CC-BY). Supported (APCs covered by funder/institution).
    Green Open Access (RRS) Publishing in subscription journal but self-archiving AAM immediately. Author retains copyright via pre-existing CC-BY license. No direct APC cost; supported via repository infrastructure.
    Transformative Agreements Publishing in a hybrid journal covered by institutional deal. Author retains copyright under contract terms. Supported via centralized institutional subscription-to-read-and-publish funds.

    Plan S Compliance Checklist for Principal Investigators

    • Check if your funding agency is a member of cOAlition S and mandates Plan S compliance.
    • Determine if your target journal is fully Open Access, transformative, or permits RRS.
    • Include the mandatory cOAlition S rights retention statement in your manuscript submission.
    • Apply a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license to your Author Accepted Manuscript.
    • Deposit your accepted manuscript in an approved institutional repository immediately upon publication.