CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: plan s open access

  • cOAlition S Funders: Who’s In, Who Has Left

    cOAlition S funders are the roughly two-dozen national research funders, charitable foundations and international bodies — including UKRI, Wellcome Trust, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Commission — that publicly endorsed Plan S in 2018 and continue to require immediate, CC BY open access from their grant recipients. Not every major funder stayed the course: the Gates Foundation has diverged toward a preprint-first model, and the European Research Council, Sweden’s Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and India’s national funders withdrew or declined to join outright.

    cOAlition S is the funder consortium — not a legal entity but a voluntary alliance of research-funding and research-performing organisations — that created and continues to steward Plan S, the 2018 open-access mandate requiring full and immediate public access to publications arising from the funding it provides. This guide sets out exactly who is in that coalition today, who has left, and what that split means for grants administrators trying to work out which awards trigger Plan S compliance obligations.

    What is cOAlition S and who funds it?

    cOAlition S launched on 4 September 2018 when a group of eleven national research funding organisations, coordinated through Science Europe, announced a “collective declaration of commitment” to mandate open access from 1 January 2020. The coalition has since grown to include national funders across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, several of the world’s largest biomedical and scientific charities, and formal support from the European Commission and the World Health Organization.

    Membership is not static. Funders join, adjust their policies, or step away as their own institutional priorities and legal constraints evolve — which is exactly why a periodically-updated reference list, rather than a single static claim, is the useful format for this question.

    Which funders currently back Plan S?

    cOAlition S’s own organisations page groups its supporters into national funders, charitable and international funders, and European funders (including the European Commission). Based on cOAlition S’s published membership record and the sourced Wikipedia membership history, the coalition’s core currently includes the following.

    • National research funders: UK Research and Innovation (UKRI); Austrian Science Fund (FWF); France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR); Science Foundation Ireland (SFI); Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN, Italy); Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR); Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO); Research Council of Norway (RCN); National Science Centre, Poland (NCN); Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal); Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS); Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas), Forte and Vinnova; Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF); Academy of Finland; National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC, Australia); South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC); Jordan’s Higher Council for Science and Technology; and Zambia’s National Science and Technology Council.
    • Charitable and international funders: Wellcome Trust; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (with a materially diverged policy — see below); the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); Templeton World Charity Foundation; and Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP).
    • Institutional and multilateral support: the European Commission, which funds Horizon Europe on Plan S-aligned open-access terms, and the World Health Organization.

    cOAlition S publishes this list as a live, JavaScript-rendered directory rather than a static page, so administrators verifying a specific funder’s status should cross-check coalition-s.org/organisations directly rather than relying solely on any single secondary source, including this one.

    Which funders have left or diverged from Plan S?

    Three organisations have formally withdrawn from or declined to join cOAlition S, and one major member has substantially diverged from the original Plan S model while remaining nominally affiliated.

    Funder Status What changed
    Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Member, policy diverged 2024 “preprint-centric” policy took effect January 2025; the foundation stopped paying article processing charges (APCs) and instead requires a preprint at or before formal publication, rather than mandating immediate open access to the accepted manuscript itself.
    European Research Council (ERC) Withdrew, July 2020 Supported the initiative from 2018 but its Scientific Council withdrew, citing concerns that Plan S’s implementation was too restrictive for early-career researchers and limited publication-venue choice.
    Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ), Sweden Left, 2019 An early signatory that withdrew citing concerns over the implementation timeline.
    India (national funders) Declined to join, October 2019 Principal Scientific Adviser Vijay Raghavan announced India would pursue its own national open-access policy rather than sign on to cOAlition S.

    The Gates Foundation case is the one administrators most often ask about, because Gates remains publicly associated with the open-access movement while its funding terms have moved furthest from the original Plan S template. Its 2024 policy refresh, reported by Nature in April 2024, replaced APC funding with a preprint-first requirement — a shift toward green, repository-based access rather than the gold, journal-published-and-APC-funded model Plan S initially popularised. Wellcome Trust, by contrast, has kept its CC BY, zero-embargo requirement fully aligned with Plan S principles and remains a full cOAlition S member.

    How does this affect grant compliance for administrators?

    For research administrators, the practical question is rarely “is my institution generally Plan S-aligned” — it is “does this specific grant trigger Plan S obligations.” That depends entirely on the funder listed on the award, not on the institution or the discipline.

    • A UKRI, Wellcome, SNSF, NWO or European Commission (Horizon Europe) grant carries a live Plan S-style requirement: immediate, CC BY, zero-embargo open access to the peer-reviewed manuscript, with rights retention where the funder has adopted that strategy.
    • A Gates Foundation grant awarded or renewed after January 2025 requires a preprint at or before publication, but no longer carries a guaranteed APC payment — so budgeting APCs into a Gates-funded proposal on the old assumption will leave a funding gap.
    • An ERC (Horizon Europe) grant sits in a genuinely mixed position: the ERC itself withdrew cOAlition S support in 2020, but ERC grants are still funded under Horizon Europe, which the European Commission administers on Plan S-aligned terms — so the operative obligation traces to the Commission’s rules, not the ERC’s own institutional stance.
    • A grant from a funder never affiliated with cOAlition S (most US federal agencies, most Indian national funders) should be checked against that funder’s own policy rather than assumed to follow Plan S at all.

    The single most reliable compliance step is to check the specific funder named on the award letter against cOAlition S’s current organisations list and that funder’s own most recent policy document, rather than relying on institutional memory of what a funder required in 2019 or 2020.

    Frequently asked questions

    Has the Gates Foundation left cOAlition S?

    No. The Gates Foundation remains formally affiliated with cOAlition S, but its 2024 policy refresh — effective January 2025 — dropped APC funding in favour of a preprint-first requirement, moving its practical terms away from the original Plan S model without a formal exit.

    Is Wellcome Trust still part of Plan S?

    Wellcome Trust is a founding cOAlition S member and remains fully aligned with Plan S: its open-access policy requires immediate deposit of the peer-reviewed manuscript under a CC BY licence with no embargo, matching the original 2018 mandate.

    Why did the European Research Council withdraw from cOAlition S?

    The European Research Council backed the initiative in 2018 but its Scientific Council withdrew support in July 2020, stating that Plan S’s implementation guidance was too restrictive, particularly for early-career researchers‘ choice of publication venue.

    Where can I find the full, current list of cOAlition S funders?

    cOAlition S publishes its authoritative, continuously updated member list at coalition-s.org/organisations, grouped into national funders, charitable and international funders, and European funders — administrators should treat that page, not older news coverage, as the source of record.

    Implications and outlook

    cOAlition S was never designed as a fixed, closed membership — it is a voluntary coalition that funders join and leave as their institutional strategies evolve. The Gates Foundation’s shift toward a preprint-centric model is the most consequential recent change because it signals that even committed founding-era supporters are questioning APC-funded gold open access as the default route, in favour of greener, lower-cost alternatives. For institutions with active research administration functions, the practical takeaway is to treat “is this funder in cOAlition S” as a per-grant lookup rather than a one-time institutional assumption, and to revisit that lookup whenever a funder announces a policy refresh.

  • Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy vs Plan S and REF Requirements

    The Wellcome Trust open access policy requires immediate, embargo-free deposit of Wellcome-funded research articles in Europe PMC under a CC BY licence, restricts article-processing-charge funding to fully open-access venues from January 2025, and layers a separate data-sharing mandate on top of its OA rules — diverging in mechanics from both Plan S’s route-based minimum and REF 2029’s embargo-tolerant, lower-bar licensing floor.

    Wellcome is a UK-based biomedical research charity and a founding funder of cOAlition S, the international funder consortium that created Plan S in 2018.

    What does Wellcome’s open access policy require in 2026?

    Wellcome’s policy, in force since 1 January 2021 and tightened twice since, applies to all original research articles arising in whole or part from its funding. Three mechanics define it. First, the article must be deposited in Europe PMC and made freely available on the official publication date, with no embargo permitted. Second, authors must retain enough rights to apply a CC BY licence to the Author Accepted Manuscript — a mechanism known as rights retention — with CC BY-ND granted only by exception. Third, from 1 January 2025 Wellcome funds article-processing charges only in fully open-access journals or platforms; transitional funding for hybrid “read and publish” agreements ended in December 2024.

    A 16 January 2024 update added a fourth route: where neither the Version of Record nor the Accepted Manuscript can be made compliant, a CC BY-licensed preprint posted to a Europe PMC-indexed server before final publication now satisfies the policy. Scholarly monographs and book chapters submitted after 1 January 2021 fall under a related but separate Wellcome monograph policy, which permits a maximum six-month embargo — a materially different rule from the zero-embargo standard applied to journal articles.

    How Wellcome aligns with — and adds to — Plan S

    Wellcome has been a cOAlition S founding member since 2018, and its journal-article rules track Plan S’s core requirements closely: immediate access, a CC BY default, and no embargo. Both frameworks recognise the same three compliance routes — publishing in a fully open-access venue, self-archiving via rights retention in a repository, or publishing through a transformative agreement — and both use the shared Journal Checker Tool to let authors verify a venue in advance.

    Wellcome goes beyond the Plan S baseline in enforcement and scope. Plan S sets principles each signatory funder operationalises independently; Wellcome adds funder-specific detail Plan S does not itself mandate — the 2024 preprint route, a ban on OA block-grant funds paying hybrid APCs, and named sanctions (loss of lead-applicant eligibility, suspended grant payments) for non-compliance. Plan S does not prescribe monograph rules; Wellcome does, via its separate six-month-embargo monograph policy.

    Where Wellcome diverges from REF 2029’s open access rules

    REF 2029 — the UK’s national research assessment exercise, run by Research England and the other UK funding bodies — is not a Plan S signatory framework, and its open access requirements are structurally looser than Wellcome’s. Under the REF 2029 policy for outputs published between 1 January 2026 and 31 December 2028, journal articles and conference proceedings must be deposited within three months of publication, but embargoes are still permitted: up to six months for Main Panels A and B, and up to twelve months for Main Panels C and D. That is a reduction from REF 2021’s 12- and 24-month allowances, but it is not the zero-embargo standard Wellcome and Plan S apply.

    REF 2029’s licensing floor is also lower. While CC BY is the funding bodies’ stated preference, a CC BY-NC-ND licence — Non-Commercial, No Derivatives — meets the minimum requirement, versus Wellcome’s CC BY default with only narrow CC BY-ND exceptions. REF 2029 additionally excludes monographs, book chapters and scholarly editions from its open access scope entirely, whereas Wellcome applies its own (separate) embargo rule to those output types. The table below summarises the divergence.

    Requirement Wellcome (2026) Plan S / cOAlition S REF 2029
    Embargo (journal articles) None None 6 months (Panels A/B); 12 months (Panels C/D)
    Default licence CC BY (CC BY-ND by exception) CC BY CC BY preferred; CC BY-NC-ND meets minimum
    APC funding scope Fully OA venues only (from Jan 2025) Route-dependent, funder-operationalised Not an APC-funding body
    Compliance route Europe PMC deposit, rights retention, or CC BY preprint Gold OA, rights retention, or transformative agreement Repository deposit (green route) within 3 months of publication
    Monographs/book chapters In scope; max 6-month embargo Not prescribed by Plan S itself Out of scope for REF 2029
    Data sharing mandate Separate DMSP requirement Not part of core Plan S text Not part of REF open access policy

    Data sharing and rights retention: Wellcome’s additional layer

    Neither Plan S nor REF 2029 mandates data sharing as a condition of open access compliance; Wellcome does, through a policy that operates alongside — not inside — its OA rules. Wellcome’s Data, Software and Materials Management and Sharing Policy, updated 1 August 2024, requires funded researchers to submit an outputs management plan and to maximise access to research data with as few restrictions as possible. For research relating to public health emergencies, the policy requires quality-assured interim and final data to be shared as rapidly and as widely as possible, ahead of formal publication.

    • A Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMSP) is typically required at the application or award stage, not deferred to end-of-grant reporting.
    • The rights-retention statement authors must insert into subscription and hybrid-journal submissions is a Wellcome-specific compliance artefact — it is not required in the same form under REF 2029’s repository-deposit route.
    • Non-compliance with either the open access or the data-sharing policy can trigger the same sanction: ineligibility to apply as lead applicant on future Wellcome grants.

    This is the funder-specific compliance gap institutions most often miss: a paper can satisfy REF 2029’s repository-deposit rule and still fail Wellcome’s audit if the underlying dataset was not made accessible under the separate data policy.

    Frequently asked questions

    Does Wellcome allow any embargo on open access articles?

    No. Wellcome’s open access policy requires immediate deposit in Europe PMC with no embargo for original research articles. This is stricter than REF 2029, which permits six- or twelve-month embargoes depending on the assessment panel, and applies only to journal articles and conference proceedings, not to monographs.

    Is Wellcome Trust a Plan S funder?

    Yes. Wellcome has been a founding member of cOAlition S since 2018 and its 2021 policy was designed to align with Plan S principles. However, Wellcome operationalises those principles through its own mechanics — including a 2024 preprint-compliance route and named non-compliance sanctions — that Plan S itself does not mandate.

    Do REF 2029 open access rules apply to monographs?

    No. REF 2029’s open access policy covers only journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN; monographs, book chapters and scholarly editions are excluded from the current cycle, though UK funding bodies have signalled monograph requirements from the following REF exercise.

    Will Wellcome pay for open access publication in a hybrid journal?

    Not from January 2025 onward. Wellcome’s OA block grant now funds article-processing charges only in fully open-access journals or platforms; the transitional funding for hybrid “read and publish” agreements ended in December 2024.

    Implications for institutions and researchers

    Research administration teams managing multi-funder portfolios cannot apply one embargo or licensing rule across Wellcome, Plan S-aligned funders and REF 2029 — the three frameworks set genuinely different floors. A paper compliant with REF 2029’s CC BY-NC-ND minimum via green deposit can still breach Wellcome’s zero-embargo, CC BY-default rule if Wellcome funding is also acknowledged. Institutions need compliance checklists that track funder-specific mechanics, not a generic “open access” requirement, and should route Wellcome-funded outputs through the Journal Checker Tool before submission rather than after acceptance.

    The direction of travel across all three frameworks is convergence on stricter terms: REF’s embargo ceilings have already fallen once, UK funding bodies have flagged monograph open access for the exercise after REF 2029, and Wellcome’s data-sharing layer signals that funders increasingly treat open access and open data as linked obligations, not separate ones. Compliance processes built around funder-specific detail, not the lowest common denominator, will hold up best as these policies keep tightening.

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

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

    What Plan S Actually Requires

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

    Two mechanisms did the heavy lifting:

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

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

    The Case Against the Blanket Mandate

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

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

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

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

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

    cOAlition S’s Own Retreat From Rigidity

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

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

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

    Common Questions About Plan S

    What is Plan S in open access?

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

    Do I have to pay for open access?

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

    Toward Differentiated Funder Mandates

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

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

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

    Conclusion: What Should Come Next

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