CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: open access policy

  • 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.

  • cOAlition S Leaders Group Explained: Governance, Executive Steering Group and Funders

    What Is cOAlition S and How Is It Governed?

    Research administrators tracking open-access compliance often ask who is actually behind Plan S decisions. The cOAlition S Leaders Group is the top decision-making body of cOAlition S, the international consortium of research funders that launched Plan S in 2018 to mandate immediate open access to publicly funded research.

    cOAlition S itself has no autonomous legal capacity. It is, in its own words, “an informal alliance of organisations and institutions that fund and/or perform research activities” whose members have publicly committed to implementing Plan S principles. That single fact shapes everything else about its governance: policy is agreed collectively, but enforcement remains the legal responsibility of each individual funder.

    Governance runs through three tiers: the Leaders Group sets strategy, the Executive Steering Group implements it, and a secretariat provides day-to-day operational support. Two supporting bodies — an Experts Group and a network of Open Access Ambassadors — feed technical advice and community feedback into the process.

    The Leaders Group: Where Plan S Policy Is Set

    The Leaders Group is composed of the heads of cOAlition S member organisations — national and regional research funders, philanthropic funders, and the European Commission. It approves the coalition’s overall strategy, agrees the principles that Plan S-aligned policies must follow, and appoints both the Executive Director and the Executive Steering Group.

    As of 2026, the Leaders Group is chaired by Mari Sundli Tveit, Chief Executive of the Research Council of Norway and President of Science Europe — a dual role that illustrates how tightly cOAlition S governance and Science Europe leadership now overlap.

    A sample of Leaders Group representation, drawn from cOAlition S’s published governance list, shows the geographic and institutional spread involved:

    Member organisation Country / region Leaders Group representative
    Research Council of Norway Norway Mari Sundli Tveit (Chair)
    Research Council of Finland (AKA) Finland Floora Ruokonen
    French National Research Agency (ANR) France Claire Giry
    Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) Slovenia Mirjam Dular
    European Commission European Union Marc Lemaître
    Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) Portugal Francisco Santos
    Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) United States (philanthropic) Bodo Stern
    Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) United States (philanthropic) Randy Schekman

    Membership turns over as staff change roles, so the current, authoritative composition is always the governance list published on coalition-s.org rather than any secondary source — including this one.

    The Executive Steering Group, Director, and Secretariat

    Below the Leaders Group sits the Executive Steering Group, which translates approved strategy into an operational work plan and supervises the cOAlition S Office. It is chaired by Lidia Borrell-Damián, Secretary General of Science Europe — again reflecting the close personnel overlap between the two bodies.

    Day-to-day leadership sits with the Executive Director, who leads the Executive Steering Group and acts as the coalition’s principal spokesperson. Leadership has changed hands recently: Johan Rooryck stepped down in July 2025 after six years in the role, a period that saw the coalition’s fastest growth. Curt Rice, a former university rector, was subsequently appointed Director in May 2026 to lead strategy implementation.

    Operational and financial support is provided by the secretariat, which is appointed by and reports to the Leaders Group. The secretariat’s hosting arrangement has itself shifted: cOAlition S functions moved from the European Science Foundation to OPERAS AISBL, a Brussels-based research infrastructure for open scholarly communication, which now hosts the cOAlition S Secretariat.

    The coalition’s own published figures show its office budget has contracted sharply as activities matured: total spending fell from roughly €1.12 million in 2022 to €545,167 in 2025, with staffing dropping from 3.5 FTE (2022–23) to around 2 FTE in 2025, partly reflecting the sunsetting of the Journal Comparison Service in early 2025.

    • Leaders Group — policy-making and strategic direction
    • Executive Steering Group — implementation and oversight of the work plan
    • Secretariat (OPERAS AISBL) — finance, operations, communications
    • Experts Group — technical and policy advice
    • Open Access Ambassadors — community outreach and feedback

    Answer-First: Common Questions on cOAlition S Governance

    Who sits on the cOAlition S Leaders Group?

    The Leaders Group is made up of the heads of cOAlition S member organisations — national and regional research funders, philanthropic funders, and the European Commission. It approves overall strategy, agrees Plan S principles, and appoints the Executive Director and Executive Steering Group.

    What does the cOAlition S Executive Steering Group do?

    The Executive Steering Group turns Leaders Group strategy into an operational work plan and supervises the cOAlition S Office. It is chaired by the Secretary General of Science Europe, while the coalition’s Executive Director leads day-to-day delivery and public representation.

    Who is the current director of cOAlition S?

    Curt Rice was appointed Director of cOAlition S in May 2026, succeeding Johan Rooryck, who stepped down as Executive Director in July 2025 after six years leading the coalition through its period of fastest growth and expansion.

    Where is the cOAlition S secretariat based?

    The cOAlition S Secretariat is hosted by OPERAS AISBL, a research infrastructure for open scholarly communication based in Brussels, Belgium. It replaced the European Science Foundation as host and now provides operational, financial, and communications support to the coalition.

    Member Funders and the Science Europe Connection

    cOAlition S is frequently — and inaccurately — conflated with Science Europe, the Brussels-based association of European research funding and research-performing organisations. The two are formally distinct bodies with separate mandates, but the overlap in senior personnel is real and consequential: both the Leaders Group chair and the Executive Steering Group chair currently hold senior Science Europe positions.

    This overlap matters for institutions tracking policy signals. When Science Europe’s governing board discusses open-access principles, the same individuals frequently carry those positions into cOAlition S Leaders Group meetings, and vice versa. Research offices monitoring funder mandates should therefore treat Science Europe statements and cOAlition S announcements as related but not interchangeable — each body has its own decision process and its own binding effect on individual funders’ policies.

    Member funders span national research councils (Norway, Finland, France, Slovenia, Portugal, among others), the European Commission, and private philanthropic funders such as HHMI and ASAP. Each retains full legal responsibility for enforcing its own open-access policy — cOAlition S coordinates the principles, but compliance monitoring (for example through the Journal Checker Tool) happens at the level of the individual funder.

    What This Means for Institutions, Publishers, and Researchers

    For research administration and funder-compliance teams, the practical implication is that Plan S obligations are not centrally enforced. Institutions should track the specific published policy of whichever cOAlition S funder supports a given grant, rather than assuming a single unified cOAlition S rulebook applies everywhere.

    For publishers, the leadership transition to a new Director in 2026, alongside the secretariat’s move to OPERAS, signals a period of operational change rather than a shift in Plan S’s core open-access principles. The coalition entered a new 2026–2030 strategic phase that reaffirms open access while broadening its remit toward “rapid, open, transparent, and equitable” sharing of research more generally — a scope expansion worth watching for anyone tracking open-science mandates rather than open-access mandates narrowly.

    For anyone building funder-compliance workflows, the governance map is straightforward once separated into its three tiers: strategy (Leaders Group), implementation (Executive Steering Group and Director), and operations (Secretariat). Understanding which tier issued a given statement helps determine whether it reflects settled policy or an in-progress work plan.

  • 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.

  • REF 2029 Resumes: What the Criteria Reset Means for Research Administrators

    REF 2029 is moving again. On 10 December 2025, the Research Excellence Framework’s steering group confirmed that panel criteria-setting had resumed following a pause announced in September 2025 by UK Science Minister Lord Vallance. For the teams inside universities who spend the next three years assembling submissions — research administrators, impact officers, open access librarians, and research information managers — the resumption is the real starting gun. The headline changes are narrower than many in the sector feared, but they are consequential enough to require an immediate review of institutional preparation plans.

    The pause itself was unusual. Criteria-setting for a national research assessment exercise does not normally stop mid-process, and the intervention signalled that ministers and the four UK higher education funding bodies had substantive concerns about burden, complexity, and the pace of change built into the original REF 2029 proposals. The resumption announcement did not simply restart the previous plan — it reset several of its most contested elements, while explicitly protecting the original submission timetable.

    What Changed When REF 2029 Criteria-Setting Resumed

    The December 2025 update confirmed a revised weighting structure across the three REF 2029 assessment components. Contribution to Knowledge and Understanding — the successor to the REF 2021 “Outputs” element — carries 55% of the overall score, with Engagement and Impact at 25%. The environment-facing element, renamed Strategy, People and Research Environment (SPRE) from the earlier “People, Culture and Environment” framing, was reduced from a proposed 25% down to 20%. That reduction is a clear signal: the sector’s concerns about the administrative burden of culture-and-environment reporting were heard, even as the underlying ambition to assess research culture more seriously survives in a scaled-back form.

    Two further decisions matter operationally. First, the REF 2021 approach to output volume has been reinstated: a recommended maximum of five outputs per researcher returns, and the minimum-of-one requirement that had been floated for REF 2029 has been dropped. Second, and more unusually, the funding bodies confirmed there will be no formal consultation on the finalised guidance or on the Panel Criteria and Working Methods documents. That is a direct trade-off for holding the original timetable — panels are expected to begin meeting in early 2026 to finalise criteria, with full guidance expected later in the year and the Code of Practice due to Research England by May 2026.

    For research offices, the practical implication is that the window for informal influence — via disciplinary associations, mock consultations, or panel-member contacts — is now the primary channel for feedback, since there will be no structured consultation round to fall back on.

    What Is UKRI, and Where Does REF 2029 Sit Within It

    REF 2029 is run jointly by the four UK higher education funding bodies — Research England, the Scottish Funding Council, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland — not by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) as a whole. This distinction trips up newer staff in research support offices, so it is worth stating plainly: UKRI is the umbrella body that brings together the seven discipline-specific research councils (including the AHRC, EPSRC, and MRC), Research England, and Innovate UK under a single funding and policy structure. Research England, the funding body responsible for coordinating REF 2029 on behalf of the sector, is one part of UKRI — but REF itself is a devolved-nations exercise, not a UKRI grant programme.

    This matters because research administrators frequently need to track two parallel compliance regimes at once: REF submission requirements, and UKRI grant terms and conditions attached to funded projects. UKRI terms and conditions govern how funded research must be reported, archived, and made accessible, and increasingly these obligations overlap with REF eligibility criteria — most visibly on open access. Institutions that already have robust processes for monitoring UKRI-funded outputs, including through the UKRI Gateway to Research database of funded awards and outputs, are better placed to extend that same tracking discipline to the wider pool of REF-eligible outputs.

    Open Access and the Compliance Trail Research Offices Must Track

    The REF 2029 open access policy took effect on 1 January 2026, moving up from the originally proposed 2025 date. In-scope outputs — journal articles and conference contributions with an ISSN, published between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2028 — must be made open access, subject to defined exceptions and a tolerance allowance for non-compliance. Critically, the funding bodies have confirmed that publications already compliant with UKRI’s open access policy will be treated as meeting the REF 2029 requirement automatically, without extra action from the author or institution. That alignment is genuinely useful: it means institutional repository workflows built around UKRI compliance can, in large part, be reused rather than duplicated for REF purposes.

    There is no mandate for open access on longform outputs (monographs, book chapters) in REF 2029 itself, but a requirement will apply to the following assessment cycle, with implementation no earlier than 1 January 2029 — a signal that research offices supporting humanities and social science disciplines should begin socialising longform open access practice now rather than waiting for a formal deadline.

    One further wrinkle deserves attention from anyone tracking UKRI news and REF developments in parallel: for multi-authored outputs submitted across different units of assessment, panels may still require a short statement identifying the named researcher’s contribution to a shared piece of work. That practice sits close to the transparency rationale behind contributor-role taxonomies. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, and the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 — a reminder that clear, structured contribution statements have value well beyond journal bylines, including in national assessment exercises that must adjudicate credit on co-authored work.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    With the original timetable protected and no formal consultation to lean on, institutional research offices have a narrower, more time-pressured set of tasks between now and the submission window in autumn 2028. Priorities should include:

    • Rebuild output-selection modelling around the five-output cap. Any planning done on the assumption of a one-to-five range, or the removed minimum, needs to be redone against the reinstated REF 2021-style approach.
    • Reweight internal SPRE (environment) reporting effort. The drop from a proposed 25% to 20% justifies redirecting some resourcing back toward outputs and impact preparation, without abandoning culture-and-environment data collection.
    • Audit UKRI open access compliance as a REF 2029 proxy. Since UKRI-compliant outputs automatically satisfy the REF policy, institutions should treat their existing UKRI compliance dashboards — built from repository metadata and, where available, Gateway to Research records — as a first-pass REF eligibility check.
    • Engage informally, now. With no formal consultation planned on the Panel Criteria and Working Methods, disciplinary associations, mission groups, and sector bodies such as ARMA and INORMS are the realistic channels for shaping fine-grained guidance before it is finalised.
    • Track the Code of Practice deadline. Institutional Codes of Practice are due to Research England by May 2026; equality, diversity, and staff-selection procedures embedded in these documents need sign-off well before that date.
    • Prepare contribution statements for co-authored outputs. Where panels request explanatory statements for multi-authored work, structured contributor documentation — of the kind CRediT was designed to standardise — will speed up compilation considerably.

    Institutions should also treat UKRI’s own news channels as a standing input to REF planning. Because Research England sits inside UKRI’s organisational structure, updates on Gateway to Research functionality, grant terms and conditions, and open access policy frequently precede or accompany REF 2029 guidance changes; monitoring UKRI news alongside the dedicated REF 2029 website reduces the risk of missing a linked policy update.

    A Compressed Runway, Not a Reprieve

    The resumption of REF 2029 criteria-setting should not be read as a return to business as usual. The funding bodies have made real concessions on weighting and output volume, but they have paid for the protected timetable by removing the formal consultation step that institutions had built into their own planning cycles. Panels convening in early 2026 will finalise criteria without further sector-wide review, which means the informal groundwork research offices do over the coming months — engaging disciplinary panels, testing output-selection scenarios, and reconciling REF requirements against existing UKRI compliance infrastructure — will carry more weight than in previous cycles. The institutions that treat this as a compressed runway, rather than a reprieve, will be the ones ready when full guidance lands later in 2026.

  • What Counts as a Preprint? A 2026 Glossary for Research Offices

    Ask five researchers what a preprint is and you may get five slightly different answers — a working paper, a draft awaiting peer review, “the version on arXiv,” or simply “not the real paper yet.” For research offices drafting policy language on open access compliance, data management plans, and research assessment submissions, that ambiguity is a liability. The preprint meaning has become precise enough in standards documentation — from NISO, DataCite, and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) — that institutions no longer need to guess. This glossary sets out the terminology research administrators need to write policy that survives an audit, a funder query, or a REF 2029 submission check.

    The stakes are not academic. UKRI’s open access policy, cOAlition S’s Plan S implementation guidance, and NIH’s data management and sharing policy all reference preprints, postprints, and versions of record as distinct objects with different compliance implications. Get the terminology wrong in an institutional policy and you risk researchers depositing the wrong version, funders rejecting compliance claims, or citation records fragmenting across multiple, unlinked copies of the same work. As open science mandates strengthen globally, a shared, standards-based vocabulary is no longer optional background reading — it is operational infrastructure.

    Preprint Meaning: A Working Definition for Research Offices

    At its simplest, a preprint is a complete draft of a research manuscript that has not yet undergone formal peer review, made publicly available — typically via a dedicated preprint server — before or independently of journal submission. The preprint definition used across NISO’s Journal Article Versions (JAV) recommended practice (NISO RP-8-2008) and subsequent guidance treats the preprint as the earliest stable, citable version in the manuscript lifecycle: the author’s own work, formatted for sharing, but not yet vetted by editors or reviewers.

    Three features distinguish a preprint from other manuscript states:

    • No peer review has occurred. The content reflects the author’s claims and methodology as submitted, unmediated by editorial or reviewer intervention.
    • It is deposited on a recognised preprint server — arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, SSRN, and discipline-specific repositories are the most established examples — which assigns a persistent identifier, typically a DOI, and a deposit timestamp.
    • It establishes priority and openness simultaneously. The timestamp on a preprint server can serve as evidence of when a finding was first disclosed, independent of the (often much later) journal publication date.

    COPE’s guidance on preprints is explicit that preprints are a legitimate part of scholarly communication, not a lesser or informal category — but it also requires that journals and authors disclose preprint status clearly, and that editors have policies for how prior preprint posting interacts with subsequent peer review and publication.

    From Preprint to Postprint to Version of Record: The Publication Lifecycle

    Confusion most often arises between “preprint” and “postprint,” two terms that sound similar but describe opposite ends of the peer-review process. A postprint (sometimes called an “accepted manuscript” or “author accepted manuscript,” AAM) is the version of a paper that has passed peer review and been accepted for publication, but has not yet had the publisher’s copy-editing, typesetting, and formatting applied. This is frequently the version institutional repositories are permitted to hold under green open access routes, because publisher agreements typically restrict redistribution of the final typeset article while permitting the author’s accepted manuscript to be shared, often after an embargo.

    The version of record (VoR) is the final, publisher-formatted, definitively citable version — the one that carries the journal’s pagination, DOI resolution to the publisher platform, and any post-publication corrections or retraction notices. NISO’s JAV framework identifies additional intermediate states (the “proof” stage, and “corrected version of record” where errata have been applied), but for institutional policy purposes, the three-stage distinction — preprint, postprint, version of record — covers the overwhelming majority of compliance scenarios research offices encounter.

    This matters practically. A funder mandate that requires deposit of the “accepted manuscript” within a defined window is asking for the postprint, not the preprint and not the VoR. Conflating the three in institutional guidance produces non-compliant deposits, embargo miscalculations, and researcher confusion at the exact moment administrators most need clarity.

    How DataCite, COPE, and NISO Define These Terms

    Because preprints now carry persistent identifiers and are cited independently, metadata standards bodies have had to formalise their treatment. DataCite’s metadata schema includes “Preprint” as a distinct resourceTypeGeneral value, and its relation-type vocabulary (IsPreprintOf / HasPreprint) allows a preprint DOI to be explicitly linked to the eventual journal article DOI once one exists. This linkage is what allows citation tracking, repository dashboards, and research information systems to recognise that two DOIs represent the same underlying work at different lifecycle stages, rather than treating them as unrelated outputs — a distinction that matters directly for accurate publication counts in REF-style assessment exercises and for avoiding duplicate-record inflation in CRIS platforms.

    CrossRef performs a parallel function for journal-affiliated preprint servers, registering preprint DOIs and supporting the same relation-type linking so that a reader arriving at a preprint can be pointed to the published version once it exists, and vice versa.

    NISO’s contribution is primarily the version taxonomy described above (JAV), plus its broader work on persistent identifiers and metadata interoperability, which underpins how systems like ORCID reliably attribute both a preprint and its later published version to the correct author record — increasingly important as ORCID iDs become a near-universal requirement across funder and publisher submission systems.

    COPE’s role is ethical and procedural rather than technical: its guidance addresses how editors should handle papers that were previously posted as preprints, how to manage cases where a preprint is later found to contain errors or misconduct, and how licensing on preprint servers should be disclosed to avoid conflicts with subsequent publisher copyright agreements. Read together, DataCite and CrossRef provide the identifier and metadata plumbing, NISO provides the version vocabulary, and COPE provides the editorial ethics — three complementary layers a single institutional glossary needs to reflect accurately.

    Preprint Servers and the Policy Questions They Raise

    The proliferation of preprint servers — general (SSRN), disciplinary (arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv), and increasingly institutional — raises questions research offices are now expected to answer in policy: Which preprint servers does the institution recognise for compliance purposes? Does depositing on a preprint server satisfy a funder’s “immediate open access” requirement, or only the “accepted manuscript” requirement? How should preprints be represented in promotion and tenure dossiers, and how should reviewers weigh work that has not yet been peer reviewed?

    UKRI’s open access policy and cOAlition S’s Plan S both give explicit standing to preprints as a compliance route in specific circumstances, while NIH’s now-enforced data sharing and public access policies require institutions to track which version of a manuscript satisfies which obligation. Ambiguity in local guidance forces researchers to interpret funder rules themselves — inconsistently, and at institutional risk.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    Precise terminology is not a semantic nicety; it is the basis of enforceable, auditable policy. Research offices should:

    • Adopt the preprint / postprint / version-of-record distinction as standard language across open access policy, repository deposit guidance, and researcher-facing FAQs — rather than each unit inventing its own phrasing.
    • Reference DataCite’s and CrossRef’s relation-type linking when advising on how preprints and their published counterparts should be connected in institutional repositories and CRIS systems, to avoid duplicate or orphaned records.
    • Align embargo and compliance guidance to the correct manuscript version specified by each funder — the accepted manuscript (postprint) in most green open access mandates, not the preprint.
    • Build preprint-awareness into research integrity training, reflecting COPE’s guidance on disclosure and editorial handling of previously posted work.
    • Ensure ORCID records and institutional profiles capture preprints as distinct, linked outputs rather than omitting them or conflating them with the eventual journal article.

    As open science practice matures and preprints move from niche practice to mainstream infrastructure across disciplines, the institutions with the clearest internal vocabulary will be the ones best positioned to answer funder audits, support accurate research assessment submissions, and give researchers confidence that sharing early is compatible with getting credit later. The terminology already exists in standards documentation from NISO, DataCite, and COPE — the task for research administrators in 2026 is simply to adopt it consistently.

  • What the cOAlition S 2026-2030 Strategy Means for Your Institution’s Open Access Policy

    In November 2025, cOAlition S — the funder alliance behind Plan S — published its strategic direction for 2026 to 2030, and the cOAlition S strategy 2026 document marks the most significant recalibration of the coalition’s open access policy since Plan S launched in 2018. For research offices, the headline is not that open access requirements are loosening. It is that the coalition is walking away from the transformative agreements it once tolerated as a bridge to full open access, while redirecting funder investment toward diamond open access and reaffirming, unchanged, its core mandate for immediate open access under a CC BY licence.

    For institutions that built compliance workflows around transformative “read and publish” deals, this is not a minor administrative footnote. It changes which routes to compliance your researchers can rely on, which publisher agreements your library or research office should keep renewing, and where new funding lines for open infrastructure are likely to appear over the next four years. This explainer sets out what has actually changed, what has stayed the same, and what research administrators should be updating in internal open access policy documents now.

    cOAlition S 2026 to 2030 strategy: the end of transformative agreement support

    Transformative agreements — the large “read and publish” or “publish and read” contracts negotiated between library consortia and major publishers such as Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley — were always framed by cOAlition S as a temporary compliance route, not a destination. They allowed institutions to satisfy Plan S requirements without every researcher negotiating individual article processing charge (APC) waivers or rights-retention clauses, on the understanding that publishers would use the revenue to convert subscription journals to fully open access titles within a defined period.

    The cOAlition S 2026 to 2030 strategy confirms that this transitional support is over. Funders in the coalition will no longer treat transformative agreements as an acceptable long-term compliance mechanism, reflecting a long-standing concern, raised repeatedly since the original Plan S implementation guidance, that many transformative deals converted little content to genuine open access while entrenching APC-based publishing economics at large commercial publishers. Institutions that have relied on a transformative agreement as their primary Plan S compliance route should treat this as a signal to diversify, not a cliff-edge deadline to panic over, but the direction of travel is unambiguous: the coalition wants funded researchers publishing through routes that do not depend on subscription-linked bundled contracts.

    Expanding diamond open access investment

    The counterpart to withdrawing support from transformative agreements is an expansion of funder investment in diamond open access — journals and platforms that charge no fee to authors and no subscription fee to readers, typically run by universities, learned societies, library consortia or national research infrastructures rather than commercial publishers. This builds on work already under way through the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access and the DIAMAS project, which have mapped the diamond OA landscape across Europe and identified capacity, quality-assurance and sustainability gaps in community-owned publishing.

    For research offices, the practical implication is that the menu of “approved” publication venues under funder open access policy is likely to broaden to include more diamond OA journals and platforms, some of which may be less familiar to academic staff than established commercial titles. Research administrators should expect funders to ask institutions to help identify, vet and promote diamond OA venues in their disciplines, and to factor diamond OA into researcher guidance rather than treating APC-based gold open access as the default paid route to compliance.

    What hasn’t changed: the immediate CC BY mandate

    It would be a mistake to read the cOAlition S 2026 to 2030 strategy as a loosening of open access requirements. The core Plan S principle — that research arising from coalition-funded grants must be made immediately open access, with no embargo, under a CC BY licence (or, in defined circumstances, CC BY-ND) — remains fully in force. So does the Rights Retention Strategy, which allows authors to apply an open licence to the author accepted manuscript at the point of submission, regardless of the publisher’s own policy, precisely so that researchers are not locked into paying an APC or relying on a transformative agreement to comply.

    In other words, Plan S gold open access — publishing in a fully open journal, whether APC-funded or diamond — remains one valid compliance route, as does green open access via rights retention and immediate deposit in a repository. What the 2026 to 2030 strategy removes is institutional and publisher reliance on transformative agreements as a proxy for compliance, and what it adds is funder appetite to underwrite non-APC alternatives so that gold open access is no longer synonymous with paying a commercial publisher.

    cOAlition S members and the wider funding landscape

    cOAlition S members include UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Science Foundation Ireland, Luxembourg’s Fonds National de la Recherche, and the European Commission acting on behalf of Horizon Europe, among other national and regional funders. Because these funders between them cover a substantial share of publicly funded research across Europe, a strategic shift of this kind has effects well beyond the institutions directly funded by coalition members — publishers and platforms that want to remain viable routes to compliance for European-funded authors have to adapt their offerings accordingly, and non-coalition funders elsewhere often watch cOAlition S’s direction when reviewing their own mandates.

    Research offices supporting international, multi-funder projects should note that not every funder a researcher reports to will move at the same pace. Where a project is co-funded by a cOAlition S member and a funder with a different open access policy, the more stringent requirement typically governs compliance — so the withdrawal of transformative agreement support from coalition funders does not automatically loosen obligations under, for example, UKRI’s own open access policy or NIH data-sharing requirements, which continue to operate on their own terms.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    Institutional open access policies, researcher guidance pages and library-negotiated agreement lists were largely written on the assumption that transformative agreements were a stable, funder-endorsed compliance route. That assumption no longer holds for cOAlition S-funded research. Research offices should treat the following as near-term priorities:

    • Audit compliance messaging. Update internal guidance that lists transformative agreements as a “safe” route to Plan S compliance; reframe them as one option among several, with declining funder endorsement.
    • Reconfirm rights retention workflows. Ensure researchers and grants staff understand that applying a CC BY licence to the author accepted manuscript at submission, under the Rights Retention Strategy, remains a robust and funder-preferred compliance path that does not depend on any publisher contract.
    • Map diamond OA venues in relevant disciplines. Work with library and repository teams to identify credible diamond open access journals and platforms so researchers have a vetted list rather than discovering options ad hoc.
    • Flag co-funding conflicts early. Where projects have mixed funding sources, confirm which policy is most stringent before advising researchers on their compliance route.
    • Watch publisher responses. Expect publishers with large transformative agreement portfolios to adjust pricing, waiver schemes or their own diamond and community-publishing offerings in response to reduced funder backing — track these changes when renewing agreements.
    • Brief research leadership. Associate deans for research and heads of library services should be aware that funder-endorsed compliance routes are shifting, ahead of the next round of institutional open access policy review.

    Conclusion

    The cOAlition S strategy 2026 announcement does not soften Plan S; it sharpens the coalition’s original argument that open access should not simply reproduce commercial subscription economics under a new name. By withdrawing endorsement from transformative agreements and channelling investment toward diamond open access, cOAlition S is betting that community-owned, non-APC publishing can scale to meet demand that was previously absorbed by bundled publisher contracts. Whether that bet pays off will depend on how quickly diamond OA infrastructure can absorb volume without compromising editorial quality or long-term sustainability — a question the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access and DIAMAS project were designed to help answer.

    For research administrators, the practical task is less about reacting to a single announcement and more about maintaining policy documents that can flex as funder expectations continue to evolve through 2030. Institutions that keep rights retention workflows well understood, diamond OA options mapped, and researcher guidance current will be best placed to support compliance regardless of which route to open access their funders favour next.

  • Transformative Agreements Are Ending: What Publishers and Institutions Should Do Next

    From January 2025, cOAlition S stopped counting transformative agreements as compliant with Plan S by default, ending five years of tacit funder support for the mechanism that had allowed hybrid subscription journals to offer immediate open access under an interim licence. For publishers and institutions that had built entire open access strategies around read-and-publish deals, the shift is not academic. It forces a hard choice between converting to full open access, negotiating narrower independent agreements, or leaning more heavily on rights retention and repository deposit. Understanding the mechanics of a transformative agreement open access deal — and why funders have lost patience with it — is now essential for anyone managing compliance across a research portfolio.

    The timing matters. Transformative agreements were always framed as a bridge, not a destination: a way to move subscription publishers toward full open access without an abrupt shock to library budgets or editorial pipelines. cOAlition S set an explicit end date for that bridge, and 2025 is when the funding underpinning it formally lapses for many participating publishers. Institutions that assumed renewal on the same terms are now recalculating budgets, contracts, and compliance monitoring in real time.

    Why cOAlition S Withdrew Support for Transformative Agreements

    Plan S, launched by a coalition of research funders including UKRI and several European national agencies, always treated the Plan S hybrid journal as a transitional category. Hybrid titles — subscription journals that also offer an open access option article by article — were permitted under transformative agreements only because those agreements included measurable, time-limited commitments to flip fully to open access. cOAlition S’s own monitoring found that too few agreements were delivering credible transition trajectories at the pace originally envisaged, and continuing to fund the intermediate step indefinitely risked entrenching hybrid publishing rather than ending it.

    The practical effect from 2025 is that cOAlition S funders no longer treat compliance with a transformative agreement as automatically satisfying their open access policy. Authors funded by participating agencies must instead demonstrate compliance through one of the routes Plan S has always prioritised: publishing in a fully open access venue, publishing under an independently negotiated agreement that meets specific transparency and pricing criteria, or exercising rights retention to deposit the accepted manuscript in a repository regardless of the publisher’s own licensing terms.

    The Practical Options: Full-OA, Independent Deals, and Rights Retention

    For publishers, the most direct response is converting hybrid titles to fully open access — removing the subscription dependency entirely and pricing through article processing charges or diamond/no-fee models. This satisfies funders outright but carries real revenue risk for society and mid-sized publishers whose subscription base has not yet been replaced by APC income at scale.

    A second route is the independently negotiated read-and-publish deal: an agreement that continues to bundle reading access with publishing rights, but which is renegotiated outside the cOAlition S monitoring framework, typically at institutional or consortium level with more explicit transition milestones and price transparency. Several national consortia are already restructuring deals along these lines rather than abandoning read-and-publish arrangements altogether.

    The third, and arguably most consequential for institutions, is the cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy. Under rights retention, authors apply a Creative Commons licence to their accepted manuscript at submission — regardless of where they ultimately publish — and deposit that manuscript in an institutional or subject repository, satisfying an open access repository mandate even when the journal itself remains subscription-based or hybrid. This decouples compliance from publisher business models entirely, which is precisely why funders favour it as transformative agreements wind down. The Wellcome open access policy and the ERC open access policy have both moved in this direction, requiring immediate deposit with an open licence rather than accepting embargoed green open access as sufficient.

    Metadata and Persistent Identifiers: Making Post-TA Workflows Auditable

    Whichever route an institution favours, the compliance burden shifts from the publisher’s contract terms to the research office’s ability to prove, at the level of the individual output, which policy was satisfied and how. That is a metadata problem as much as a policy problem. Funders auditing compliance without a central transformative agreement to point to need reliable, machine-readable evidence: a CrossRef DOI carrying accurate licence and funding metadata, an ORCID iD linking the author to the funder award, a Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifier confirming the affiliated institution, and a repository record with a resolvable identifier showing date of deposit and applied licence.

    This is where the infrastructure built around persistent identifiers earns its keep. A repository deposit under rights retention is only auditable if the manuscript record, the funder grant number, and the author identifier are all linked consistently — otherwise institutions cannot demonstrate compliance at scale across thousands of outputs, and funders cannot verify it either. DataCite-assigned identifiers for datasets and outputs, combined with ORCID and ROR, give institutions a way to generate compliance reports without relying on publisher-supplied dashboards that may disappear along with the agreement itself. Research offices that have invested in clean, well-populated metadata pipelines are considerably better positioned for this transition than those that treated identifier hygiene as a back-office afterthought.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    Research administrators now need to treat open access compliance as a per-output audit trail rather than a portfolio-level contract. Practical priorities include:

    • Auditing which current agreements are genuinely at risk of losing funder recognition in 2025 and beyond, and flagging affected corresponding authors early.
    • Strengthening repository workflows so that rights-retention deposits happen at submission, not after acceptance, since embargo-based green open access no longer satisfies the strictest funder policies.
    • Ensuring ORCID, ROR, and grant metadata are captured consistently at the point of manuscript submission, not reconstructed retrospectively for a funder audit.
    • Briefing researchers, particularly early-career authors, on how rights retention interacts with journal submission terms, since some publishers still contest the strategy in their own author agreements.
    • Reviewing consortium-level negotiating positions where independent read-and-publish deals are being pursued as a replacement for cOAlition S-recognised transformative agreements.

    Institutions with mature research information management systems — those already aligned with standards from ORCID, DataCite, and CrossRef — will find this transition largely a configuration exercise. Those still relying on manual spreadsheets or publisher-reported compliance figures face a heavier lift, and a compressed timeline in which to build it.

    A Bridge That Has Reached Its Far Bank

    The end of cOAlition S funding for transformative agreements is not a retreat from open access — it is a signal that funders consider the transitional phase complete for a meaningful share of the market, and expect the sector to move to durable models: full open access, transparent independent agreements, or rights retention backed by repository deposit. The institutions and publishers that adapt fastest will be those that have already invested in the unglamorous infrastructure of identifiers and metadata, because that infrastructure is what turns a policy commitment into something a funder, an auditor, or a future researcher can actually verify.

    As with the CRediT contributor role taxonomy — originated by CASRAI in 2014 and now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 — the lesson is consistent: standards and identifiers only deliver value once they are consistently applied across the research lifecycle. Post-transformative-agreement open access will be judged less on rhetoric and more on whether every output can be traced, licensed, and verified.

  • UKRI’s New Research Data Policy: A Plain-English Briefing for Institutional Administrators

    UKRI is expected to publish an updated research data policy in summer 2026, and institutional research offices should not wait for the final text to start preparing. Signals from UKRI’s existing Common Principles on Data Policy, its 2022 open access policy, and the broader direction of travel across funders point clearly toward a single organising idea: “maximising data value.” For research administrators, that phrase is not a slogan — it is a compliance requirement in waiting, and it will touch data management plans, persistent identifiers, and the systems that track them long before any enforcement clock starts ticking.

    The pattern is familiar. When the UKRI open access policy took effect for journal articles in 2022 and for monographs in 2024, institutions that had already invested in repository infrastructure, author identifier hygiene, and rights-retention workflows absorbed the change with minimal disruption. Those that had not scrambled. A forthcoming UKRI research data policy is likely to follow the same script, extending the funder’s open research agenda from published articles to the underlying datasets, code, and materials that support them.

    This briefing sets out, in plain English, what “maximising data value” is likely to mean operationally, and what a research data management policy readiness checklist should contain before the formal text arrives.

    What “Maximising Data Value” Means for a UKRI Research Data Policy

    UKRI’s framing of data value draws directly on the FAIR principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable — first articulated in the scientific data community and now embedded in funder expectations across the UK, the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, and beyond. In practice, “maximising value” is unlikely to mean simply “publish more data.” It means data that can be discovered through standard metadata, accessed under clear licensing terms, described in formats other researchers’ tools can parse, and reused with enough provenance information to trust it.

    For administrators, the operational translation is threefold:

    • Findable — datasets need persistent identifiers and rich, machine-readable metadata, typically registered through services such as DataCite, so they surface in discovery tools rather than sitting on an unindexed institutional server.
    • Accessible — access conditions (open, embargoed, or restricted for sensitive data) must be stated explicitly and consistently, not left to individual researcher discretion.
    • Interoperable and Reusable — data needs documented standards, controlled vocabularies where they exist, and licensing that permits reuse, mirroring the rights-retention logic already familiar from open access compliance.

    None of this is achievable researcher-by-researcher at the point of grant closeout. It requires infrastructure that exists before the data is generated — which is precisely why an anticipatory approach matters more than a reactive one.

    Data Management Plans as the Compliance Backbone

    Data management plans (DMPs) are the mechanism through which funders convert data policy principles into auditable commitments. UKRI councils already require DMPs for many grant types, but a unified data policy is likely to standardise expectations across councils that have historically varied — a source of persistent friction for multi-council and interdisciplinary awards.

    Institutions should treat the DMP not as a one-off grant-application document but as a living compliance artefact, reviewed at key milestones: award, mid-project, and closeout. This is where the overlap with research integrity policy becomes explicit. Bodies such as COPE and the UK’s own research integrity infrastructure have repeatedly linked poor data stewardship — undocumented provenance, irreproducible datasets, unclear authorship of derived outputs — to the conditions that enable disputes and, in the worst cases, retractions tracked by services such as Retraction Watch. A robust DMP process is therefore not merely an administrative box to tick; it is a frontline research integrity control.

    Administrators should also expect closer alignment between DMP compliance and the CRediT contributor role taxonomy, which clarifies who is responsible for which stage of data collection, curation, and analysis. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. Institutions that already map CRediT roles into their publication workflows are well placed to extend the same logic to dataset contributorship statements.

    Persistent Identifiers: The Infrastructure Layer Nobody Notices Until It’s Missing

    Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are the connective tissue of any credible research data infrastructure, and they are the single most concrete thing an institution can fix before a policy lands. Three PIDs matter most:

    • ORCID identifiers for researchers, now widely mandated across funder and publisher workflows, ensuring datasets are correctly attributed even when authors move institutions or change names.
    • ROR (Research Organization Registry) identifiers for institutional affiliation, increasingly required alongside ORCID to disambiguate which organisation is accountable for which output.
    • DataCite DOIs for the datasets themselves, giving each dataset a citable, resolvable, permanent address independent of where it happens to be hosted.

    CrossRef DOIs for articles and DataCite DOIs for datasets should be linked bidirectionally wherever possible, so that a published paper and its underlying data form a verifiable pair. Institutions that have not yet audited their systems for consistent ORCID and ROR capture — particularly in their electronic research administration platforms, current research information systems, and repository intake forms — should treat this as the highest-priority, lowest-cost preparation step available. It requires no new policy to justify; it improves compliance readiness for every funder mandate, not just UKRI’s.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    The institutions best positioned for a summer 2026 policy announcement will not be the ones that read it fastest — they will be the ones whose sponsored research administration infrastructure already produces compliant metadata as a by-product of normal grant management, rather than as a bolt-on exercise triggered by audit anxiety. Practical steps worth starting now include:

    • Auditing current DMP templates against FAIR principles and standardising them across faculties or research councils where practice has diverged.
    • Confirming that ORCID and ROR capture is mandatory, not optional, at the point of grant setup within the institution’s research administration system.
    • Establishing or reviewing institutional agreements with DataCite (directly or via a national or subject repository) for dataset DOI minting.
    • Mapping data stewardship responsibilities using a CRediT-style contributor framework, so accountability for data quality is documented rather than assumed.
    • Briefing research integrity offices now, so that data policy compliance is understood as an extension of existing research integrity policy rather than a parallel, competing process.

    Professional bodies including ARMA, NCURA, EARMA, and INORMS have all flagged funder data mandates as a growing training and resourcing need for research administrators; institutions that engage with these networks now will have a head start on interpreting whatever UKRI ultimately publishes.

    Looking Ahead

    A formal UKRI research data policy, when it arrives, will almost certainly be framed around the language of value, openness, and reuse rather than restriction. But the operational substance — FAIR-compliant metadata, disciplined data management plans, and consistent use of persistent identifiers — is already knowable, and already actionable. Institutions that treat the coming months as a compliance sprint rather than a waiting period will be the ones for whom “maximising data value” is simply a description of how they already work, not a new burden imposed from outside.

  • NIH’s March 2026 Grants Policy Statement: What Every Institution’s Research Office Needs to Do Now

    The National Institutes of Health has issued a March 2026 revision to the NIH Grants Policy Statement (NOT-OD-26-057), and research offices outside the United States are not exempt from its reach. Any UK or international institution holding a subaward, consortium agreement, or direct NIH grant now has a compliance clock running: the most consequential change — a new prior-approval requirement for subawards — takes effect from 1 June 2026.

    For research administrators, this is not a routine annual refresh. The revised NIH grants policy statement 2026 tightens subrecipient monitoring, reinforces the NIH Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy, and, less visibly but just as significantly, hardens expectations around how contributor roles are documented on funded outputs. Institutions that treat this as a US-only administrative update will find themselves scrambling when their next competing renewal or Just-in-Time submission is flagged for missing subaward documentation.

    This explainer sets out what changed, why it matters for research grant administration beyond NIH’s own borders, and the concrete steps a research office should be taking this quarter.

    What NOT-OD-26-057 Actually Changes

    The headline change in the March 2026 NIH Grants Policy Statement revision is the introduction of a prior-approval step before a recipient institution may issue certain subawards under active NIH grants. Historically, subaward issuance sat largely within a recipient’s own delegated authority once the parent award was in hand, subject to standard federal subrecipient monitoring obligations under 2 CFR 200 (the Uniform Guidance). From 1 June 2026, awardee institutions must obtain NIH sign-off before finalising subawards that meet the thresholds specified in the revised policy — a shift that mirrors the agency’s broader push, visible across recent Notices, to get earlier visibility into where federal research funds ultimately flow.

    For UK universities and research institutes that sit downstream as subrecipients on US-led NIH awards, this changes the practical timeline of collaboration. A subaward that might previously have been executed within weeks of a parent award’s Notice of Award could now be delayed pending NIH’s prior-approval review. Research offices coordinating multi-country consortia — a common pattern in genomics, infectious disease, and clinical trials networks — need to build this lag into project start dates and budget-period planning, and should flag it explicitly to principal investigators who are used to faster subaward turnaround.

    Data Management and Sharing: Convergence, Not a New Burden

    The revised Grants Policy Statement does not introduce a new data-sharing regime; instead, it folds the existing NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy more tightly into the core policy document, making DMS plan compliance an explicit, cross-referenced condition of award rather than a companion policy institutions could treat as separate. In practice, this means DMS plans are now read alongside the Grants Policy Statement’s subaward and reporting provisions as a single compliance package, which raises the stakes for institutions whose data plans have been thin or templated.

    The same logic applies to the NIH open access policy lineage — the NIH Public Access Policy that governs deposit of peer-reviewed manuscripts arising from NIH funding. The 2026 revision continues to align expectations around timely deposit, persistent identifiers, and machine-readable metadata with the broader global shift toward open science, echoed in UKRI’s own open access policy and the cOAlition S Plan S principles. Institutions with NIH-funded outputs should treat manuscript deposit compliance and DMS plan fidelity as two halves of the same reporting obligation, not separate boxes to tick.

    Contributor Roles and the Attribution Layer

    A quieter but structurally important element of the revised policy is its reinforcement of contributor-role transparency in reporting and progress reports involving multiple investigators and subrecipient teams. Where an award spans several institutions, NIH’s expectation is that reporting clearly distinguishes who did what — an expectation that maps naturally onto the contributor role taxonomy first published as CRediT.

    CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and its fourteen roles — from Conceptualization and Methodology through to Writing – Original Draft and Writing – Review & Editing — give research offices a ready-made, internationally recognised vocabulary for exactly the kind of multi-institution attribution NIH’s revised reporting language is asking for. Institutions that already require CRediT statements on manuscripts arising from grant-funded work, and that track contributor roles at the ORCID-linked researcher level, will find it far easier to produce the kind of granular reporting the 2026 policy anticipates than those relying on ad hoc author-order conventions.

    This is a useful moment for research offices to check whether their internal reporting templates for multi-site NIH awards actually capture contributor roles in a structured way, or whether that information exists only informally between collaborating PIs.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    The combined effect of the subaward prior-approval rule, the tighter DMS/open-access linkage, and the contributor-attribution expectations is a policy environment that rewards institutions with mature research administration policy 2026 infrastructure and penalises those still managing NIH compliance manually. Concretely, research offices should:

    • Map every active and pipeline NIH subaward against the new prior-approval thresholds, and rebuild subaward issuance timelines to account for the review step from 1 June 2026.
    • Audit existing DMS plans against the revised Grants Policy Statement language, not just the standalone DMS Policy text, to close any gaps in how the two are cross-referenced.
    • Confirm that manuscript deposit workflows tied to the NIH Public Access Policy are functioning ahead of any competing renewal or annual progress report.
    • Introduce or reinforce CRediT-based contributor statements in multi-institution reporting, using ORCID identifiers to anchor role attribution at the individual level.
    • Brief PIs directly — subaward delays and reporting changes affect project planning, not just the compliance office, and PIs are often the last to hear about policy notices like NOT-OD-26-057.

    Bodies such as NCURA, EARMA, and ARMA have all flagged the growing complexity of cross-border federal compliance as a priority area, and institutions should look to these networks — alongside INORMS — for shared templates and peer benchmarking rather than building compliance responses in isolation. Investment in structured research administration training on the revised Grants Policy Statement, delivered before the June deadline, will do more to prevent downstream delays than any last-minute scramble once subawards start stalling in review.

    Looking Ahead

    NIH’s March 2026 revision is best read as part of a broader convergence: funder policies, open science mandates, and structured attribution standards are increasingly expected to interlock rather than operate as parallel compliance streams. Research offices that align their subaward management, data-sharing infrastructure, and contributor-role reporting now — rather than treating each as a separate policy silo — will be far better placed not only for this revision, but for the funder policy changes that are likely to follow it as NIH, UKRI, and other major funders continue to tighten the links between funding, data stewardship, and verifiable attribution of research contributions.