CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: research funders

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

    What Is cOAlition S? (Quick Answer)

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

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

    cOAlition S vs Plan S: Why the Distinction Matters

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

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

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

    Origins, Governance and Membership

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

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

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

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

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

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is Plan S?

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

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

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

    How many funders belong to cOAlition S?

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

    Is cOAlition S a government body?

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

    Why the Distinction Matters for Compliance

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

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

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

    Looking Ahead: cOAlition S in 2026

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

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

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

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

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

    What cOAlition S actually announced in November 2025

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

    Three strategic priorities now anchor the plan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What enforcement looks like now

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

    This is a meaningful distinction for anyone doing compliance work:

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

    Common questions about the open access commitment

    What is Plan S in open access?

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

    Has cOAlition S dropped its open access mandate?

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

    Who are the cOAlition S funders?

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

    Are transformative agreements still funded under Plan S?

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

    Implications for institutional compliance workflows

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

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

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