CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: plan s principles

  • Plan S Wikipedia vs cOAlition S: What Changed

    Plan S is an initiative for open-access science publishing, launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, a consortium of research funders. Wikipedia’s article on Plan S is broadly accurate on the initiative’s origins and ten principles, but its most-cited figures on transformative agreements, rights-retention uptake, and coalition membership are frozen between 2021 and 2023 — and the article makes no mention of cOAlition S’s own Strategy for 2026-2030, published in November 2025.

    Plan S is the requirement, backed by cOAlition S funders, that peer-reviewed research they fund be made immediately and freely available in a compliant open-access journal, platform, or repository, without embargo, under an open licence.

    What does Wikipedia say about Plan S?

    Wikipedia’s “Plan S” article opens by describing the initiative as a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries, requiring that publicly funded research be published in open repositories or fully open-access journals by 2021. It correctly identifies cOAlition S as the coordinating body and lists the ten founding principles set out in the original implementation guidance.

    The article also notes real, later developments: the extension of the compliance deadline from 2020 to 2021, the Rights Retention Strategy, an October 2023 proposal to explore publishing models without author-facing fees (“diamond” open access), and a 2024 Gates Foundation policy shift described as not fully aligned with Plan S. This shows the page is edited, not abandoned — but the edits are sparse and several core figures have not been touched in years.

    Where the Wikipedia article holds up

    Several elements of Wikipedia’s account remain a fair summary of Plan S as it was designed. The ten principles — author copyright retention, standardised and capped publication fees, funder-level monitoring of compliance, and the explicit statement that hybrid open-access journals do not satisfy the key principle — match the original guidance released by the Science Europe-coordinated task force on 27 November 2018.

    The licensing detail is also accurate: compliant articles must carry a CC BY 4.0 licence, or alternatively CC BY-SA 4.0 or CC0, and journals must meet baseline peer-review standards consistent with guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). None of this has changed, and Wikipedia states it correctly.

    Where the record is stale

    The gaps are concentrated in exactly the areas that move fastest: funding mechanics, uptake statistics, and coalition scope. The table below sets Wikipedia’s wording against cOAlition S’s own published record.

    Wikipedia’s claim Current cOAlition S position Source
    Transformative agreement contracts “may not last beyond 2023” cOAlition S confirmed in January 2023 that member funding for transformative arrangements would continue but cease entirely on 31 December 2024, with no new agreements accepted after 30 June 2023 cOAlition S, “cOAlition S confirms the end of its financial support for Open Access publishing under transformative arrangements after 2024”
    Rights Retention Strategy uptake given “as of October 2021 … over 500 works” No comparable running total has been added since; the Strategy remains active guidance with no current uptake figure cited on the page cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy guidance (ongoing)
    Lede describes cOAlition S as funders “from twelve European countries” Membership and policy alignment now extends beyond that founding European core, as the article’s own later reference to the Gates Foundation’s 2024 policy shift illustrates cOAlition S member list; Wikipedia “Plan S” article, “Policy changes by member organizations” section
    No mention of a forward strategy beyond 2023-24 developments cOAlition S published its Strategy for 2026-2030 in November 2025, setting three strategic priorities across two implementation phases cOAlition S, “cOAlition S Strategy for 2026-2030”

    None of this makes the Wikipedia article wrong about what Plan S was. It makes the article an increasingly incomplete guide to what Plan S is now — a distinction that matters for anyone citing it in a policy brief, grant compliance note, or institutional guidance document.

    What cOAlition S’s 2026-2030 strategy adds

    cOAlition S’s Strategy for 2026-2030, published in November 2025, is the most authoritative recent statement of where the coalition is heading, and it is entirely absent from Wikipedia’s coverage. The strategy sets three strategic priorities: reinforcing the foundations for full, immediate, and equitable open access to peer-reviewed articles; supporting the digital infrastructure that underpins open access; and exploring financially sustainable and equitable publishing models while tracking their outcomes.

    Implementation runs in two phases. Phase one (2026-2027) concentrates on foundational work, digital infrastructure, and member services. Phase two (2028-2030) is intended to deepen work on sustainability and equity, subject to review of phase-one outcomes by the Leaders Group. This phased structure directly supersedes the transitional, 2018-2023 “transformative agreement” framing that still anchors Wikipedia’s implementation section.

    • Three strategic priorities replace the earlier single-minded focus on the 2021 compliance deadline.
    • A defined two-phase timetable (2026-2027, then 2028-2030) gives institutions a planning horizon Wikipedia’s article does not mention.
    • Financial support for transformative arrangements ended on 31 December 2024, closing a funding route Wikipedia still frames as open until “2023”.

    Common questions

    What is Plan S in open access?

    Plan S requires that peer-reviewed publications resulting from research funded by cOAlition S members be made immediately open access on publication, with no embargo, under an open licence such as CC BY 4.0. Authors must retain copyright. The requirement applied to grants awarded from 1 January 2021 onward.

    What are the five pillars of Wikipedia?

    Wikipedia operates on five pillars: it functions as an encyclopedia, is written from a neutral point of view, offers free content anyone can use or edit, expects civility among editors, and has no firm rules. Those norms explain why fast-moving funder guidance, like Plan S’s, can lag behind primary sources between volunteer edits.

    What this means for institutions and publishers

    Research administrators, library staff, and publishers who cite Wikipedia’s Plan S article as a compliance reference should treat it as a starting point, not a current-state document. Anyone advising on plan s open access obligations should verify funding-route and deadline details directly against cOAlition S’s guidance pages before applying them to a grant, agreement, or institutional policy — particularly anything touching transformative agreements, which stopped receiving cOAlition S funding at the end of 2024, not 2023.

    This pattern is not unique to Plan S. Fast-moving standards and funder mandates routinely outrun general-reference encyclopedia coverage, which depends on volunteer editors noticing and sourcing each change. The practical fix is straightforward: use Wikipedia to orient, then confirm operative dates, funding rules, and current strategic priorities against the originating body’s own published guidance.

    For related standards and terminology used across research administration, see CASRAI’s open research dictionary and the research administration pillar.

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

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

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

    What did cOAlition S actually pledge in 2018?

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

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

    What has Plan S delivered since 2018?

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

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

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

    Where did the 2020 promise fall short?

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

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

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

    How does the 2026-2030 strategy change course?

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

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

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

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

    Common questions about Plan S’s track record

    Did Plan S achieve open access by 2020?

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

    What happened to transformative agreements?

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

    How many funders belong to cOAlition S today?

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

    What this means for funders, institutions and publishers

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

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

    The verdict: catalyst, not completed reality

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

  • Plan S Principles in 2026: Mandatory vs Relaxed

    Plan S principles remain fully in force in 2026: none of the original ten clauses has been formally withdrawn. What has changed is enforcement — the temporary carve-out for hybrid “transformative agreements” expired after 2024, and cOAlition S’s November 2025 Strategy for 2026-2030 now commits to rewriting the principles document itself for the first time since 2019.

    Plan S is the funder-driven open access mandate launched by cOAlition S on 4 September 2018, requiring that scholarly publications arising from participating funders’ grants be published immediately, without embargo, in compliant open access journals, platforms or repositories. This article works through each of the ten original principles in turn and states, clause by clause, what is still mandatory, what has been reinterpreted, and what has actually lapsed.

    What Are the Ten Original Principles of Plan S?

    cOAlition S describes Plan S as “one target and 10 principles.” The target is the immediate, embargo-free open access requirement; the ten principles, published in the 2019 Plan S Principles and Implementation guidance, set out how that target is delivered and governed.

    • Authors or their institutions retain copyright, under an open licence — preferably CC BY — consistent with the Berlin Declaration.
    • Funders develop robust criteria and requirements for compliant open access journals, platforms and repositories.
    • Funders coordinate to establish and support compliant venues and infrastructure where none yet exist.
    • Open access publication fees are covered by funders or institutions, never by individual researchers.
    • Funders support a diversity of business models, with fees kept transparent, proportionate and capped where applied.
    • Funders encourage governments, universities, libraries, academies and learned societies to align their own policies.
    • Monographs and book chapters follow a longer, separately negotiated timeline.
    • Funders do not support the “hybrid” subscription-plus-OA model, except transitionally through time-limited transformative arrangements.
    • Funders monitor compliance and sanction non-compliant grantees.
    • Funding and assessment decisions value the intrinsic merit of research outputs, not the journal, its impact factor, or the publisher.

    Which Plan S Principles Are Still Mandatory in 2026?

    Seven of the ten principles are unchanged and enforced exactly as written in 2019. Copyright retention, the requirement that funders (not authors) pay compliant fees, compliance monitoring and sanctions, and merit-based assessment of outputs rather than journal metrics all remain live obligations for cOAlition S’s 28 member funders — up from the twelve founding organisations in 2018, and now spanning agencies in Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa and Australia, per cOAlition S’s own Strategy 2026-2030 document.

    The Journal Checker Tool still operationalises the “robust criteria for compliant venues” principle for every submission, and the longer, separate timeline conceded for monographs and book chapters in 2019 remains unresolved and unchanged in 2026 — cOAlition S has not published a revised monographs timetable.

    Which Principles Have Been Relaxed, Tightened or Left Unresolved?

    No principle has been deleted outright. Two have shifted, and in the opposite direction to what is commonly assumed: the anti-hybrid clause has tightened, not loosened, and the fee-diversity clause has been reinterpreted toward non-APC models rather than relaxed.

    Principle 2019 wording (summary) 2026 status
    Copyright & CC BY Authors retain copyright; CC BY preferred Mandatory, unchanged
    Robust venue criteria Funders set criteria for compliant OA venues Mandatory; enforced via Journal Checker Tool
    Infrastructure support Funders coordinate to build missing OA venues Mandatory, strengthened (Strategic Priority 2)
    Funder-paid fees Fees paid by funders/institutions, not researchers Mandatory, unchanged
    Fee diversity & transparency Diverse business models; transparent, capped fees Reinterpreted toward diamond OA and PRC models
    Policy alignment Funders encourage institutional alignment Mandatory, unchanged
    Monographs timeline Longer, separate process for books Unresolved; no 2026 update published
    No hybrid model Hybrid banned, except transitional arrangements Tightened: transitional carve-out expired after 2024
    Monitoring & sanctions Funders monitor and sanction non-compliance Mandatory, unchanged
    Merit-based assessment Assess outputs, not journal metrics Mandatory, strengthened via assessment-reform links

    The “no hybrid model” principle is the clearest case of change, and it runs counter to a common misreading. cOAlition S confirmed on 26 January 2023 that financial support for open access publishing under transformative arrangements — the negotiated pathway that let hybrid journals count as compliant during a transition period — would end after 2024, with Transformative Journal support ceasing on the same date and no new applications accepted. That decision followed 2023 compliance reviews showing roughly two-thirds of registered Transformative Journals were not meeting their agreed open access growth trajectories. This closure predates and is separate from the newer 2026-2030 strategy; it is not a relaxation but the expiry of a deliberately time-limited exception, which makes the underlying anti-hybrid principle stricter in practice from 2025 onward.

    The fee-diversity principle has not been dropped either. Instead, the cOAlition S Strategy for 2026-2030, published 12 November 2025, commits under Strategic Priority 1 to “review and update the Plan S principles and implementation guides, including enhancing the focus on sustainable and equitable models, such as PRC, diamond open access and preprints.” Diamond open access refers to publishing venues that charge neither authors nor readers; PRC (“Publish, Review, Curate”) describes models — pioneered by platforms such as eLife — where papers are posted openly before formal peer review, then reviewed and curated in the open. Neither model existed at meaningful scale when the original fee-transparency principle was drafted in 2019.

    Answer-First Q&A on Plan S in 2026

    What are the 10 principles of Plan S?

    The ten principles cover copyright retention with CC BY licensing, funder-set venue criteria, infrastructure support, funder-paid fees, diverse and transparent fee models, policy alignment across institutions, a separate monographs timeline, a ban on hybrid publishing (except time-limited transitional arrangements), compliance monitoring with sanctions, and merit-based research assessment.

    Is Plan S still in effect in 2026?

    Yes. Plan S remains active and binding for cOAlition S’s 28 member funders, and the coalition’s Strategy 2026-2030, published November 2025, reaffirms the objective of full and immediate open access while committing to update — not abandon — the underlying principles document.

    What happened to Plan S’s transformative agreements?

    cOAlition S ended financial support for open access publishing under transformative arrangements, including Transformative Journals, after 2024, following a 26 January 2023 announcement. The transitional exception that let some hybrid venues count as compliant has therefore expired, tightening enforcement of the original anti-hybrid principle.

    What is diamond open access under Plan S?

    Diamond open access describes journals and platforms that charge no fees to either authors or readers. cOAlition S’s 2026-2030 strategy names diamond OA, alongside PRC models and preprints, as a priority area for its updated principles and implementation guidance.

    Implications and Outlook for Institutions and Publishers

    For research administration teams, the practical compliance checklist is largely stable: continue verifying venues through the Journal Checker Tool, ensure CC BY licensing and funder-paid fees are documented, and treat any residual “transformative agreement” listing as expired rather than compliant. Publishers still running hybrid titles without a diamond OA or PRC pathway face reduced routes to Plan S compliance now that the transitional carve-out has closed.

    The material open question for 2026-2027 is not whether Plan S survives, but how its updated principles document — due under Strategic Priority 1 of the 2026-2030 strategy — redefines “diverse business models” once diamond OA and PRC are formally written in. cOAlition S has structured its strategy in two phases, an initial 2026-2027 period followed by 2028-2030 priorities subject to Leaders Group review, so institutions should expect incremental guidance updates rather than a single rewrite. An independent study commissioned by cOAlition S, Galvanising the Open Access Community: A Study on the Impact of Plan S (Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.13738479), credits the coalition with raising the profile of open access and bringing publishers to the negotiating table — the same leverage it is now applying to push the next generation of non-APC models.

  • REF 2029 Open Access Policy vs Plan S Rules

    The REF 2029 open access policy requires journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN, published from 1 January 2026, to be deposited within three months of publication, made available within a 6-month embargo (Main Panels A and B) or 12-month embargo (Main Panels C and D), and licensed at least as openly as CC BY-NC-ND. This is markedly more permissive than Plan S, which bans embargoes outright and pushes for CC BY as the default licence. The two frameworks share a direction of travel but diverge on timing and licensing mechanics — this walkthrough maps exactly where.

    The REF 2029 open access policy is the open-access eligibility requirement set out in Section 5 of the Research Excellence Framework 2029 guidance, published by the four UK higher education funding bodies and administered by Research England on behalf of UKRI. It determines whether a journal article or conference paper can be submitted for assessment at all — non-compliant outputs, absent an exception, are excluded from a unit’s submission.

    What is the REF 2029 open access policy?

    The REF 2029 open access policy sets the minimum conditions a journal article or conference contribution must meet to be eligible for submission to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. It applies only to in-scope outputs with an ISSN published between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2028; monographs, book chapters and other long-form outputs remain out of scope for this cycle. According to the REF 2029 guidance hub, the policy was originally published on 11 December 2024 and last updated 13 June 2025, following a formal consultation.

    Two different rule-sets apply depending on publication date. Outputs published from 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2025 are assessed against a carried-over version of the REF 2021 requirements. Outputs published from 1 January 2026 onward fall under the revised, tighter requirements described below — this is the version that matters most for anyone publishing now.

    How do the REF 2029 eligibility requirements work?

    For outputs published from 1 January 2026, compliance rests on four linked conditions: deposit, discovery, access and licensing. Each must be satisfied unless a specific exception applies.

    • Deposit: the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM), or the Version of Record where the publication agreement permits, must be deposited in an institutional repository, subject repository or preprint server within three months of publication — a shift from REF 2021, where the clock started at acceptance rather than publication.
    • Embargo: publishers may impose a closed-access period of up to 6 months for Main Panels A and B, and 12 months for Main Panels C and D, down from 12 and 24 months respectively under REF 2021.
    • Access: once the embargo lapses, the output must be free to search, read and download by anyone with an internet connection.
    • Licensing: the funding bodies’ stated preference is CC BY, but CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND and CC BY-NC-ND (or an equivalent standard of openness) are also accepted for outputs published between 1 January 2026 and 31 December 2028.

    A tolerance allowance softens strict enforcement: per the REF 2029 guidance, a unit of assessment may submit up to 5% non-compliant in-scope outputs, or one non-compliant output, whichever is higher, at no detriment. Compliance is checked through a risk-based audit process modelled on REF 2021, where 10 institutions’ submissions were selected for second-stage audit and four data adjustments resulted.

    What does Plan S require on embargoes and licensing?

    Plan S is the open-access mandate launched in 2018 by cOAlition S, an international consortium of public and private research funders. Its ten core principles require that funded research be published immediately open access, with no permitted embargo period, and that outputs carry a CC BY licence by default — CC BY-SA or CC0 are tolerated in limited cases, but more restrictive terms such as CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND are not considered compliant.

    Plan S also expects rights retention: authors, not publishers, should hold sufficient rights to make the accepted manuscript openly available regardless of any subscription-journal embargo a publisher tries to impose. This rights-retention strategy is the mechanism several UK funders — including UKRI — have adopted to enforce zero-embargo compliance without banning subscription-journal publication outright.

    REF 2029 vs Plan S: where the rules line up and diverge

    Both frameworks push toward the same destination — free, immediate, reusable access to publicly funded research — but REF 2029 gets there on a longer, more accommodating timetable than Plan S.

    Requirement REF 2029 (outputs published 2026–2028) Plan S (cOAlition S)
    Embargo period Up to 6 months (Panels A/B); up to 12 months (Panels C/D) None permitted — immediate OA required
    Licence floor CC BY-NC-ND or equivalent minimum; CC BY preferred CC BY required by default; CC BY-SA/CC0 tolerated exceptions
    Deposit deadline Within 3 months of publication Immediate, at time of publication
    Scope Journal articles and conference papers with an ISSN only All peer-reviewed outputs from funded research
    Full-openness deadline 1 January 2029 (CC BY-equivalent minimum becomes mandatory for all in-scope outputs) Already in force
    Enforcement 5% tolerance band; risk-based audit Funder-level grant compliance checks

    The convergence date is the detail most summaries of REF 2029 leave out. From 1 January 2029, the funding bodies require all future in-scope outputs to meet the full open-licensing standard — effectively the CC BY-equivalent floor Plan S has enforced since 2021 — “subject to any permissible exceptions.” Until then, outputs deposited under a restrictive publisher agreement are explicitly excused from the licensing standard provided they still meet deposit, discovery and access conditions, with no exception form required. That two-tier transition, not a flat comparison of embargo months, is the real story of how REF 2029 is closing the gap with Plan S.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What outputs are eligible for REF 2029?

    Only journal articles and conference contributions with an ISSN, published between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2028, fall inside the REF 2029 open access policy. Monographs, book chapters, datasets and preprints without an ISSN are welcomed as REF submissions but are not subject to this policy’s open access requirements.

    What are the key changes for REF 2029?

    From 1 January 2026, the funding bodies cut permitted embargo periods in half (6/12 months instead of 12/24), shifted the deposit trigger from acceptance to publication, and introduced explicit licensing minima (CC BY-NC-ND or equivalent) that did not exist under REF 2021 rules.

    What period does REF 2029 cover?

    The open access policy spans outputs published from 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2028, split into two rule sets: a REF-2021-style regime for 2021–2025 outputs, and the revised, stricter regime for outputs published from 2026 onward.

    What is an open access policy?

    An open access policy is a funder or assessment body’s formal requirement that research outputs be deposited, made discoverable and made free to read within defined conditions. Compliance is typically a precondition of funding eligibility or, as with REF 2029, of assessment eligibility itself.

    Implications for institutions and researchers

    For research administration teams, the practical shift is procedural as much as substantive: tracking date of publication rather than date of acceptance resets every deposit-deadline calculation library and repository teams have built around REF 2021. Institutions that already comply with UKRI’s Open Access Policy — in force for grant-funded outputs since 1 April 2022 — are well placed, since UKRI’s zero-embargo, CC BY-preferred terms already exceed the REF 2029 minimum.

    Publishers negotiating UK author agreements should note the AAM carve-out: outputs deposited under a restrictive publication agreement escape licensing penalties until 2029, reducing near-term pressure but setting a hard deadline. Anyone drafting institutional guidance should also consult the CASRAI dictionary of open-research terms for precise definitions of AAM, Gold, Green and embargo, since REF 2029, UKRI and Plan S each scope these terms differently.

    Looking ahead, the 1 January 2029 convergence date effectively puts REF on a collision course with Plan S’s zero-embargo, CC BY-default model — but only for licensing, not embargoes. Institutions with a five-year open access strategy should plan now for a licensing regime that will be materially stricter than anything REF has required to date, rather than treating 2026’s changes as the final word.

  • Rights Retention Strategy: Authors Keep Rights

    The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) is the cOAlition S mechanism that lets an author apply a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) — the peer-reviewed, pre-typeset version of a paper — before any publisher copyright agreement is signed. Because the licence exists first, no later publishing contract can strip the author of the right to deposit and reuse that manuscript. It is not itself a route to open access; it is a rights-based safeguard that makes the Green route enforceable even when a publisher’s terms would otherwise block it.

    In one sentence: the Rights Retention Strategy is a funder-attached licensing condition, applied at the point of grant award, requiring a CC BY licence on the AAM so that no subsequent publisher agreement can override the author’s right to share it openly.

    What Is the Rights Retention Strategy?

    cOAlition S developed the Rights Retention Strategy and announced it on 15 July 2020, designed to ensure that scholarly publications arising from funded research could be made open access regardless of a publisher’s self-archiving embargo. Under the RRS, a cOAlition S funder’s grant conditions require that a CC BY licence is applied to the AAM before submission to a journal — the licence is a condition of the funding, not a request made to the publisher.

    Authors signal this by adding a rights retention statement to the manuscript’s acknowledgements section and cover letter at submission, typically worded along the lines of: “For the purposes of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.” This statement puts the publisher on notice before any copyright transfer agreement (CTA) is discussed, which is the legal mechanism that prevents a later CTA from overriding it.

    How Does Rights Retention Differ from Green and Gold Open Access?

    Green OA is a route: an author deposits a manuscript in a repository, often after an embargo the publisher sets. Gold OA is also a route: the publisher makes the version of record open immediately, usually funded by an article processing charge (APC). The Rights Retention Strategy is neither route on its own — it is a rights mechanism that removes the publisher’s ability to impose an embargo or demand exclusive rights over the AAM, which in practice enables no-embargo Green OA without requiring an APC.

    Mechanism When rights are secured Licence applied Embargo Typical cost to author
    Rights Retention Strategy At grant award, before submission CC BY on the AAM None None
    Green OA (standard) At deposit, after publication Publisher-defined, often more restrictive Often 6–24 months None
    Gold OA At publication Usually CC BY on the version of record None Article processing charge

    The practical distinction matters for compliance: an author can satisfy a funder’s immediate-CC-BY requirement through Rights Retention without paying an APC, which is why cOAlition S built the strategy — to decouple open access compliance from publisher paywalls and Gold OA pricing.

    What Do UKRI, cOAlition S and REF Require of Authors?

    UKRI’s open access policy, in effect from 1 April 2022, requires that in-scope peer-reviewed research articles be made immediately open access on publication, via the version of record or the AAM under a CC BY licence, with no embargo permitted. Rights Retention is the mechanism many UK institutions use to guarantee this for the AAM route when a journal will not offer immediate Gold OA on acceptable terms.

    Several UK universities embedded Rights Retention into institutional policy well ahead of REF deadlines: the University of Edinburgh introduced it in April 2022, the University of Cambridge in May 2022, and the University of St Andrews in December 2022, with the N8 Research Partnership universities committing to similar statements. King’s College London instituted its Rights Retention Strategy through a revised Research Publications Policy effective 1 March 2023, explicitly framed around meeting both funder and future REF eligibility requirements. Institutional rights retention is not a new idea — Harvard University adopted the first version of this approach in 2008, more than a decade before Plan S formalised it for European and UK funders.

    • Check whether your funder is a cOAlition S signatory or a UKRI council with an equivalent CC BY mandate.
    • Add the rights retention statement to your manuscript’s acknowledgements and cover letter at submission, not after acceptance.
    • Deposit the AAM in your institutional repository on acceptance, without waiting for an embargo to expire.
    • Keep a record of the statement and deposit date for REF output-eligibility evidence.

    Authors publishing multi-author, multi-funder papers should note that the corresponding author typically applies the statement on behalf of all co-authors when negotiating with the journal — clear, attributed authorship records make this easier to evidence, which is why institutions increasingly pair rights retention guidance with structured authorship documentation.

    Common Questions About Rights Retention

    What is the Rights Retention Strategy?

    The Rights Retention Strategy is cOAlition S’s mechanism requiring a CC BY licence on the Author Accepted Manuscript, applied as a funder grant condition before journal submission. It guarantees immediate, embargo-free open access to the peer-reviewed manuscript without requiring an article processing charge or publisher permission.

    What does it mean to retain rights under Plan S?

    Retaining rights means the author keeps sufficient non-exclusive rights over the AAM to deposit, share and licence it for reuse, even after signing a publisher’s copyright transfer agreement. The CC BY licence takes legal precedence because it was applied before that agreement existed.

    What is the Rights Retention Strategy statement wording?

    Institutions use variants of a standard sentence: the author has applied a CC BY licence to the AAM “for the purposes of open access,” included in the submission cover letter and manuscript acknowledgements. Several UK universities, including Edinburgh, publish translated versions of this exact statement for international co-authors.

    How do authors notify a publisher under the Rights Retention Strategy?

    Authors notify publishers by inserting the rights retention statement into the manuscript submission itself — typically the cover letter and acknowledgements — rather than negotiating separately. This creates a documented, timestamped notice that the CC BY licence predates any subsequent copyright transfer agreement.

    What This Means for Institutions and the Next REF

    For research administrators, Rights Retention converts open access compliance from a publisher-dependent negotiation into an institution-controlled process: the licence is secured at the point of funding, not the point of publication, so compliance no longer hinges on which journal an author chooses. This matters directly for REF output eligibility, where a documented deposit and licence trail is the evidence assessors and funders will check.

    Some publishers have pushed back against Rights Retention Strategy statements, occasionally asking authors to remove them or delaying decisions, though institutions with published policies — from Harvard onward — report continued publication success across their author base. As more UK institutions and cOAlition S funders align on CC BY-by-default AAM licensing, expect the strategy to become the default compliance route wherever Gold OA APCs are unaffordable or unavailable, with research administrators increasingly tracking deposit and licence records through structured research administration systems rather than manual follow-up.

  • 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.

  • Open Access Mandate Compliance: What Seven Years of Plan S Data Show

    Seven years after cOAlition S launched Plan S in September 2018, the question is no longer whether funder mandates can move the needle on open access mandate compliance — it is what, specifically, moved, and what stayed stuck. cOAlition S’s own monitoring reports, rather than advocacy claims on either side, now give a reasonably clear evidence base for answering that.

    What Plan S Set Out to Achieve

    Plan S was convened through Science Europe with backing from the European Commission and the European Research Council. Its ten principles required that, from an implementation date eventually set at 1 January 2021 (pushed back a year from the original 2020 target), research funded by signatory organisations be published immediately open access, under an open licence, with no embargo.

    The coalition grew to more than two dozen public and philanthropic funders, including UKRI, Wellcome, and — aligned in principle if not formal membership — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Crucially, Plan S explicitly disfavoured hybrid subscription journals unless covered by a time-limited “transformative arrangement.”

    The Compliance Data: What Changed Since 2018

    Two mechanisms did most of the practical work. The Rights Retention Strategy, introduced in 2021, lets authors attach a CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript at submission — enabling compliant Green open access regardless of a publisher’s stated embargo. The Journal Checker Tool, launched the same year jointly with Wellcome and UKRI, lets authors verify funder-compliant routes journal by journal before submitting.

    According to cOAlition S’s own 2023 Annual Review, around 80% of research outputs from coalition-funded grants were published open access — above the roughly 60% global baseline for research generally. That gap is the strongest single piece of evidence that mandate-plus-tooling outperforms voluntary policy alone.

    • Gold OA (immediate, via publisher) became the most-used compliant route.
    • Green OA via the Rights Retention Strategy grew as a no-cost alternative.
    • Compliance has been consistently stronger in STEM fields than in humanities and social sciences, where funding structures differ.

    Publisher Pricing and Journal Behaviour

    Publisher behaviour shifted more than pricing transparency did. Transformative agreements — contracts bundling subscription access with open-access publishing rights — proliferated rapidly after 2018, particularly across Europe and North America; by 2024 they were supporting open-access status for well over 300,000 publications, accounting for a substantial share of global gold OA output.

    That growth came with a cost concern cOAlition S itself flagged: article processing charges concentrated financial risk on authors and institutions rather than reducing it. In response, cOAlition S announced it would stop funding “transformative journals” specifically after the end of 2024, and co-published an Action Plan for Diamond Open Access with Science Europe and OPERAS to seed no-fee, community-run alternatives.

    Route Author cost Plan S compliance status
    Gold (fully OA journal) Article processing charge, often funder-paid Compliant
    Green (Rights Retention Strategy) None Compliant, no embargo
    Hybrid via transformative agreement Bundled into institutional deal Compliant, time-limited
    Diamond/community-led None Compliant, prioritised post-2024

    The unresolved piece is longform outputs. A recent British Academy report found Book Processing Charges from larger publishers typically run £10,000–£20,000 per title, against a UKRI block-grant cap of £10,000 — and that only 18% of book records in UK institutional repositories actually hold the full text. The UK’s own REF 2029 exercise will not mandate open access for monographs this cycle; Research England confirmed in December 2024 it will apply from the following assessment period, from January 2029.

    Common Questions on Open Access Mandates

    What is an example of an open access initiative?

    Plan S is the clearest example: a funder-driven mandate launched by cOAlition S in 2018 requiring immediately open, freely reusable publication of any research these funders finance. Members include UKRI, Wellcome, the European Commission, and national research councils across more than a dozen countries.

    Do authors have to pay for open access?

    Not necessarily. Plan S’s Rights Retention Strategy lets authors deposit a CC BY-licensed accepted manuscript in a repository at no cost, satisfying compliance without an article processing charge. Gold open access typically requires a publication fee, which is why cost remains the mandate’s most contested feature.

    What are the disadvantages of open access?

    Critics point to article processing charges shifting costs from readers to authors, disadvantaging researchers at under-resourced institutions and in the Global South. Smaller and society publishers have struggled to compete for transformative agreements, and humanities disciplines have seen slower, patchier compliance than STEM fields.

    What exactly does open access mean?

    Open access mandate compliance means meeting a funder’s specific publishing requirements — typically an approved licence (usually CC BY), a maximum embargo period, and deposit in a recognised repository or journal. cOAlition S tracks this through annual monitoring reports rather than self-certification alone.

    What This Means for Institutions and Researchers

    For research administration teams, the practical upshot is that compliance now runs on tooling, not trust: the Journal Checker Tool and Rights Retention Strategy shifted the burden of proof from post-hoc audits to pre-submission checks. That has measurably raised article-level compliance rates without waiting for every journal to convert to full open access.

    It has not, however, solved cost equity. Institutions negotiating transformative agreements have effectively subsidised large commercial publishers’ transition, while smaller and society publishers, and now book publishers, face a structurally different cost problem that article-level mechanisms don’t reach. Consulting a shared reference point such as CASRAI’s open research dictionary can help teams keep licensing and embargo terminology consistent across funder policies.

    Where Plan S Goes Next

    cOAlition S’s 2023 “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal signalled a pivot away from journal-brand mandates toward funder-supported repositories and article-level open access, still under consultation. Combined with the Diamond Open Access Action Plan and the UK’s REF 2029 timeline for monographs, the next phase of Plan S looks less like a single global rule and more like a set of interoperating, funder-specific mechanisms — a shift that will make monitoring data, not policy text, the real measure of what “compliance” ends up meaning.

  • cOAlition S Monographs: What the Open Access Policy Requires

    University presses tracking funder mandates often conflate two distinct policy layers. cOAlition S monographs guidance — the coalition-wide recommendations issued by the group of research funders behind Plan S — is not the same instrument as the Horizon Europe monograph mandate that already binds beneficiaries of European Commission grants. The two are related but legally and operationally distinct, and the gap matters for any press negotiating embargoes, licences, or rights-retention clauses with an academic author.

    This explainer sets out what cOAlition S itself asks of its 20-plus funder members regarding academic books, how that differs from the binding Horizon Europe rules, and where university presses need to track both.

    What cOAlition S Actually Recommends for Monographs

    Plan S, launched in 2018, was built around Principle 7, which acknowledged that “the timeline to achieve Open Access for monographs and book chapters will be longer and requires a separate and due process” than for journal articles. cOAlition S formalised its position on academic books — defined broadly to include monographs, book chapters, edited collections, and critical editions — in a dedicated statement published on 2 September 2021.

    Crucially, that statement is framed as a set of recommendations, not a uniform mandate. Individual cOAlition S organisations are asked to adopt the following within their own remits:

    • Academic books based on funded original research should be made open access on publication.
    • Authors or their institutions should retain sufficient intellectual property rights to enable open access and re-use.
    • Books should be published under a Creative Commons licence.
    • Embargo periods should be as short as possible and must never exceed 12 months.
    • Funders should financially support open access book publishing through dedicated schemes.

    This is a coordination framework, not a single rulebook. Each member funder — UKRI, Wellcome, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Science Foundation Ireland, and others — then writes its own policy inside those boundaries, which is precisely why embargo lengths and licence choices still vary from funder to funder.

    Timeline: How the Monograph Statement Emerged

    The gap between journal and book policy was deliberate, not an oversight. Plan S’s original 2018 principles applied in full to peer-reviewed journal articles from 1 January 2021, but books were explicitly carved out for a “separate and due process.” cOAlition S’s Implementation Guidance committed the coalition to issuing a books-specific statement “by the end of 2021” — a deadline it met with the September 2021 publication.

    Since then, cOAlition S has continued developing technical guidance for open access books in collaboration with existing infrastructure providers, including the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN open access books toolkit, rather than imposing a single technical standard by decree.

    Licensing and Embargo Rules Compared Across Funders

    Because cOAlition S sets a ceiling rather than a fixed rule, the practical requirements a university press encounters depend entirely on which funder supported the underlying research. The table below compares the coalition-wide recommendation with several member funders’ actual policies, including the European Commission’s Horizon Europe rules.

    Funder / Framework Scope Maximum embargo Licence
    cOAlition S (coalition recommendation) Academic books based on funded original research 12 months Any Creative Commons licence
    Horizon Europe (European Commission) All books, monographs and long-text outputs, if peer-reviewed 0 months (immediate) CC BY, CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC (or equivalent)
    UKRI Monographs, book chapters, edited collections (from 1 Jan 2024) 12 months Any Creative Commons licence
    Wellcome Scholarly monographs and book chapters 6 months CC BY preferred; other CC licences permitted
    FWF (Austria) Peer-reviewed research results of FWF-funded research 12 months (only if FWF has not financially supported the book) CC BY and CC BY-NC required
    Research Council of Norway Academic books, monographs, edited collections, anthology chapters 12 months (immediate recommended) CC BY, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC or equivalent

    The pattern is consistent: Horizon Europe is the strictest implementation of the cOAlition S framework, not a separate policy philosophy. As an EU funding programme whose managing body sits within cOAlition S, Horizon Europe simply exercises the option every member funder has — to set its own embargo and licence rules inside the coalition’s 12-month ceiling — and chooses the tightest possible setting: zero embargo.

    Where cOAlition S and Horizon Europe Overlap — and Diverge

    The overlap is principled: both frameworks require Creative Commons licensing, both expect rights retention sufficient to enable re-use, and both trace back to the same Plan S lineage. The divergence is procedural and binding. cOAlition S’s book statement is aspirational guidance that individual funders “will seek to adopt,” whereas the Horizon Europe rules sit inside the Model Grant Agreement that every beneficiary signs — making non-compliance a contractual, auditable matter rather than a best-practice lapse.

    What is Plan S?

    Plan S is an open access initiative launched in 2018 by cOAlition S, a group of national and international research funders. It requires immediate open access to peer-reviewed journal articles from funded research, with a separate, later-developed framework for monographs and book chapters.

    Does cOAlition S require open access for monographs?

    cOAlition S recommends rather than mandates open access for monographs. Its September 2021 statement asks member funders to adopt open access on publication, Creative Commons licensing, and a maximum 12-month embargo within their own policies — leaving each funder to set the binding rule.

    How does the Horizon Europe monograph mandate differ from cOAlition S?

    Horizon Europe imposes a binding, zero-embargo open access requirement for peer-reviewed monographs funded under the programme, embedded in its Model Grant Agreement. cOAlition S’s own statement is coalition-wide guidance permitting member funders up to a 12-month embargo, making Horizon Europe the strictest single implementation of that broader framework.

    What licence does cOAlition S recommend for open access books?

    cOAlition S recommends publication under any Creative Commons licence, without mandating a single variant. Horizon Europe narrows this for its own grantees to CC BY, CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC (or a licence with equivalent rights), reflecting the sector’s greater sensitivity around commercial and derivative rights for books than for journal articles.

    Implications for University Presses and Institutions

    For presses and library publishing units, the practical task is to identify the funder, not the coalition, before setting contract terms. A monograph funded partly by Horizon Europe money is bound by the zero-embargo rule regardless of what cOAlition S’s general statement permits; a monograph funded by an FWF grant that did not directly support book production may carry a 12-month embargo instead.

    Several operational consequences follow:

    • Contracts and rights-retention clauses should be drafted per funder, not per generic “Plan S compliance” assumption.
    • Long-term data preservation and hosting arrangements matter as much as the embargo date — cOAlition S technical guidance points presses toward trusted infrastructure such as DOAB and OAPEN, mirroring the repository requirements it already sets for journal articles and datasets.
    • Mixed-funding books (part Horizon Europe, part national funder) should default to the strictest applicable rule to avoid inadvertent non-compliance.
    • Research administration teams should track funder-specific embargo tables rather than relying on a single “Plan S” checklist, since the coalition itself does not enforce one.

    Institutions with dedicated research administration functions are best placed to reconcile these variations before contracts are signed, rather than after a book has gone to press. CASRAI’s broader work on funder compliance and research administration processes is directly relevant to teams building these internal checklists.

    What Comes Next

    cOAlition S has signalled it is moving toward a more flexible, multi-model approach to open access generally, following its own December 2025 strategy review — a shift chronicled by outlets including Chemistry World. For monographs specifically, this makes near-term convergence toward a single binding coalition-wide rule unlikely; the recommendation-based structure suits the genuine diversity of book publishing economics across disciplines and countries far better than a uniform mandate would.

    University presses should therefore expect the current two-tier reality to persist: a coalition-wide floor of open access, Creative Commons licensing and a 12-month embargo cap, with individual funders — Horizon Europe most prominently — free to set stricter terms for their own grantees. Tracking both layers, rather than treating “Plan S” as one monolithic rule, remains the only reliable compliance strategy.