CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: plan s compliance

  • Journal Finder Tools Compared for Plan S Authors

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

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

    What Do Publisher Journal Finder Tools Actually Do?

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

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

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

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

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

    Does Scopus Have Its Own Journal Finder?

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

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

    Do Any of These Tools Check Plan S Compliance?

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

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

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

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

    Common Questions From Plan S Authors

    Is Wiley JournalFinder free to use?

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

    What are the alternatives to Wiley Journal Finder?

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

    What is Sherpa Romeo mainly used for?

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

    Is Wiley better than Elsevier?

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

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

  • Springer Open Access Agreement vs ACS and IEEE for Plan S Compliance

    A Springer open access agreement lets eligible corresponding authors publish gold open access in Springer Nature’s hybrid or fully-OA journals with an institution covering some or all of the article processing charge (APC). ACS achieves the same outcome through Read and Publish or Read and Green agreements, while IEEE combines institutional prepaid-APC deals with its dedicated IEEE Access journal and Transformative Journal status for hybrid titles. All three routes can satisfy Plan S — but eligibility rules, licence terms and embargo conditions differ enough that research-office staff need a publisher-by-publisher checklist before advising an author.

    In practical terms, an open access agreement is a contract between a publisher and an institution or consortium — often negotiated centrally, as Jisc does for UK higher education — that converts subscription spend into APC coverage so corresponding authors can publish gold open access without an individual invoice.

    What is an open access agreement, and why does the route matter for Plan S?

    An open access agreement is a negotiated contract, usually between a publisher and a national consortium or individual institution, that pre-pays or discounts the APC an author would otherwise owe. cOAlition S’s Plan S has required, since 1 January 2021, that publications from participating funders be openly available immediately on publication under a CC BY licence (or equivalent), published in a compliant journal, platform, or repository.

    • Gold OA in a fully open access journal — automatically compliant.
    • Gold OA in a hybrid journal — compliant only if the journal is covered by a transformative agreement or holds Transformative Journal status.
    • Green OA via immediate repository deposit under the cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) — compliant regardless of the publisher’s own licence, provided the funder mandate applies.

    Because compliance hinges on which of these three routes a specific journal supports, the practical question for research-office staff is not “does this publisher offer open access?” but “which agreement, if any, covers this journal for this author’s institution?”

    How does the Springer open access agreement work?

    Springer Nature’s transformative agreements bundle subscription reading access with OA publishing rights across the Springer, Nature, BMC, Palgrave and Adis imprints. Coverage under a given agreement takes one of three forms, according to Springer Nature’s own open access agreements page: full APC coverage, a percentage discount, or a fixed-price contribution.

    In the UK, these deals are negotiated centrally through Jisc on behalf of participating institutions, which removes the need for individual authors to seek a quote. Eligibility is checked automatically during the publishing workflow once an article is accepted, based on the corresponding author’s institutional affiliation at submission — not at acceptance.

    • Hybrid journals under a transformative agreement: gold OA with CC BY licensing, Plan S compliant where the agreement is registered.
    • Fully OA journals: gold OA with CC BY licensing, always Plan S compliant regardless of any agreement.
    • No agreement in place: authors can still pay an individual APC or use the green RRS route.

    How does the ACS Journal Publishing Agreement compare?

    The ACS Journal Publishing Agreement (JPA) is the contract every author signs upon acceptance, governing copyright, reuse and publication terms — it is separate from, and required regardless of, any institutional OA agreement. ACS layers two distinct institutional models on top of the JPA: Read and Publish, which covers the APC directly, and Read and Green, which instead grants authors the right to immediately self-archive their accepted manuscript.

    ACS introduced an Article Development Charge for authors using the zero-embargo green deposit route in hybrid journals in September 2023, meaning “green” is no longer necessarily free even where it remains immediate. Institutions and authors can check current coverage through ACS’s own institutional lookup tool at acsopenscience.org, since Read and Publish and Read and Green agreements are not interchangeable and eligibility is set per institution.

    ACS route Mechanism Author cost
    Gold OA (no agreement) Standard APC paid by author/institution Full APC
    Read and Publish Institutional agreement covers APC Free to author, capped by agreement volume
    Read and Green (zero-embargo) Immediate self-archiving under agreement Article Development Charge (from Sept 2023)

    What are IEEE Access’s submission terms and IEEE’s Transformative Journal status?

    IEEE Access is IEEE’s dedicated multidisciplinary journal, fully open access under a CC BY licence since its 2013 launch, and every accepted article carries a mandatory APC — there is no subscription “hybrid” option within the title itself. IEEE Access’s own author guidance states the submission-to-publication process typically takes four to six weeks, and requires a Word or LaTeX source file plus a matching PDF, each under 40 MB, submitted through the IEEE Author Portal.

    Separately, IEEE committed more than 160 of its hybrid journals to Transformative Journal (TJ) status under Plan S in 2023, meaning cOAlition S-funded authors can publish gold OA in those hybrid titles and remain compliant, provided their institution has (or the author pays for) the associated APC coverage. Institutional open access agreements with IEEE typically operate as prepaid APC blocks rather than a single unified “Read and Publish” brand name.

    • IEEE Access: always gold OA, always Plan S compliant, APC payable on every acceptance.
    • Transformative Journal hybrid titles: gold OA compliant only for the funding period IEEE maintains TJ status.
    • Standard hybrid journals without TJ status or an institutional agreement: green RRS deposit is the fallback compliance route.

    Which route actually satisfies Plan S for your target journal?

    Comparing the three publishers side by side shows that “gold via agreement” is the fastest compliant route everywhere, but the fallback differs: ACS’s green route now carries a charge, while the cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy remains a genuinely cost-free fallback across all three publishers when a compliant agreement is not available.

    Publisher Primary agreement type Licence on acceptance Zero-cost fallback route
    Springer Nature Transformative Agreement (Jisc-negotiated in the UK) CC BY Green RRS deposit
    ACS Read and Publish / Read and Green CC BY Green RRS deposit (Read and Green now carries an Article Development Charge)
    IEEE Institutional APC agreement + Transformative Journal status CC BY Green RRS deposit

    For a specific target journal, the check sequence is the same regardless of publisher: confirm the journal is fully OA (automatic compliance); if hybrid, confirm it sits under a transformative agreement or Transformative Journal designation the author’s institution participates in; if neither applies, use the Rights Retention Strategy to deposit the accepted manuscript immediately with a CC BY licence attached to the funder-mandated version.

    Common questions

    What is an open access agreement?

    An open access agreement is a contract between a publisher and an institution or consortium that shifts payment from individual subscriptions or per-article APCs to a bundled arrangement, letting affiliated corresponding authors publish gold open access at no direct cost, or at a fixed discounted rate.

    What licence does Springer Nature use for open access articles?

    Springer Nature’s open access articles are typically published under a CC BY licence, permitting reuse with attribution; some journals also offer CC BY-NC-ND, which restricts commercial re-use and derivative works and is generally not Plan S compliant.

    What is the ACS Journal Publishing Agreement?

    The ACS Journal Publishing Agreement (JPA) is the copyright and reuse contract every author completes at acceptance, independent of institutional funding arrangements; it governs how the article may be used and shared and applies whether or not an institutional Read and Publish agreement covers the APC.

    Implications for research-office staff

    Advising an author correctly requires checking the specific journal against the specific institutional agreement, not the publisher’s brand name in general. A journal being “with Springer” or “an ACS title” says nothing about compliance on its own.

    • Verify the target journal’s OA status (fully OA, hybrid-with-agreement, or hybrid-without-agreement) before submission, not after acceptance.
    • Confirm the corresponding author’s institutional affiliation matches the agreement’s eligibility list — coverage is usually keyed to submission-time affiliation.
    • Where no agreement or Transformative Journal status applies, brief authors on the Rights Retention Strategy as a compliant, zero-cost fallback.
    • Track embargo and licensing changes annually — ACS’s 2023 Article Development Charge shows publisher terms shift within an agreement’s life cycle.

    What this means going forward

    Transformative agreements were designed as a bridge, not an end state, and cOAlition S continues to review whether hybrid Transformative Journal arrangements should keep counting as compliant beyond their agreed windows. Research offices that maintain a live, journal-level compliance checklist — rather than relying on publisher-level assumptions — will be better placed as Springer, ACS and IEEE renegotiate their respective agreements and as funder mandates evolve. For institutions building a broader research administration compliance workflow, publisher OA-agreement status is one input alongside funder policy tracking and repository deposit monitoring.

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

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

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

    What Jisc open access agreements actually negotiate

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

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

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

    The three cOAlition S Plan S compliance routes

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

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

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

    Matching Jisc agreement types to each compliance route

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

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

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

    Common questions from UK research offices

    What is a read and publish deal?

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

    What are the three routes to Plan S compliance?

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

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

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

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

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

    A practical compliance checklist

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

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

    Implications for research offices

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

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

    Looking ahead

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