- What Is the Towards Responsible Publishing Proposal?
- The Principles cOAlition S Sets Out for a Post-APC System
- The Global Consultation and the Diamond Open Access Connection
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Implications for Research Administrators and Institutions
- Outlook: What Happens Next
What Is the Towards Responsible Publishing Proposal?
Towards Responsible Publishing is a draft proposal published by cOAlition S — the international consortium of research funders behind Plan S — in October 2023. It sets out a vision and a set of principles for a future scholarly communication system, together with a mission that enables funders, working with other stakeholders, to help deliver it.
The proposal builds directly on Plan S, the 2018 funder commitment to full and immediate open access. Five years on, cOAlition S argues that publishing practice has not kept pace with how research is actually produced, shared and used. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how slow traditional peer-reviewed publishing can be when speed matters, accelerating researcher adoption of preprints, open peer review and scholar-led “diamond” publishing models that charge neither authors nor readers.
Where Plan S targeted the terms of open-access mandates, Towards Responsible Publishing targets the underlying business model. cOAlition S describes subscription charges and, over time, article processing charges (APCs) as “highly inequitable” — since both make publication and access contingent on institutional or author ability to pay — and proposes shifting the system towards one that authors, not payment capacity, control.
The Principles cOAlition S Sets Out for a Post-APC System
Rather than mandating a single replacement model, the proposal frames a direction of travel. The themes that run through the proposal and its subsequent consultation include:
- Author control over dissemination — researchers decide when and how their work is shared, rather than being routed through a single high-cost venue.
- Preprinting as a default step — early, open sharing of findings ahead of formal peer review, already the practice cOAlition S credits with speeding up pandemic-era science communication.
- Open, transparent peer review — reports published alongside articles, with the consultation later finding a researcher preference for reviewer anonymity even within open models.
- Permissive, open licensing — enabling reuse without funder mandates being experienced as impositions on academic practice.
- Redirected resourcing — shifting funds currently spent on subscriptions and APCs towards scholar-led and community-owned publishing infrastructure over time.
The following table sets out how the three dominant funding models compare on who pays and where the equity risk sits — the core tension the TRP proposal is trying to resolve.
| Model | Who pays | Reader access | Main equity concern |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | Institutions/libraries | Paywalled unless subscribed | Excludes under-resourced institutions from reading |
| APC (gold OA) | Author or their institution/funder | Free to read | Excludes under-resourced authors from publishing |
| Diamond OA | Funders, institutions, consortia (not per-article) | Free to read | Free to publish, but depends on sustained collective funding |
The Global Consultation and the Diamond Open Access Connection
Because a scholar-led system depends on buy-in from the research community it is meant to serve, cOAlition S commissioned a global consultation, delivered by Research Consulting and Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), running from November 2023 to May 2024. It engaged more than 11,600 respondents worldwide: 440 responses to an initial stakeholder feedback survey, 72 focus-group participants, and 11,145 responses to an online global researcher survey — supplemented by 10 organisational feedback letters solicited specifically to offset an initial underrepresentation of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
The published findings, released via Zenodo in mid-2024, showed broad cross-regional and cross-disciplinary support for preprint posting, permissive licensing and open peer review. But they also surfaced a hard constraint: researchers, particularly in LMICs, remain dependent on journal indexes and impact factors when choosing where to publish, because career and funding assessment still rewards them. Without reform of research assessment running in parallel, the consultation warned, TRP risks being read as an imposition by well-resourced nations on researchers who cannot easily disengage from prestige metrics.
This is precisely where diamond open access enters the picture. Diamond journals and platforms — typically scholar-led, community- or institution-owned, and free to both authors and readers — are the closest existing proof that a non-APC system can function at scale. cOAlition S’s own account of the “developments forcing a rethink” explicitly names diamond models pioneered in Latin America as evidence that scholar-led publishing services are viable, not theoretical. Search demand data reinforces the parallel interest: “diamond open access” and comparison queries such as “diamond open access vs gold open access” show sustained monthly search volume, indicating institutions and researchers are actively trying to map their own funding-model choices onto exactly the debate TRP is having at the funder level.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Towards Responsible Publishing proposal?
Towards Responsible Publishing (TRP) is a draft proposal published by cOAlition S in October 2023 that sets out a vision and set of principles for a future scholarly communication system less dependent on subscription and article-processing-charge funding, alongside a mission for funders to help deliver it.
How many researchers took part in the cOAlition S consultation on TRP?
Over 11,600 respondents took part between November 2023 and May 2024, run by Research Consulting and Leiden University’s CWTS, comprising 440 stakeholder-survey responses, 72 focus-group participants and 11,145 responses to a global researcher survey.
Does Towards Responsible Publishing abolish APCs immediately?
No. The proposal and its consultation findings point to a phased transition: encouraging preprints and open licensing in the short term, open peer review in the medium term, and reforming incentives and funding flows away from APCs only over the longer term.
How does Towards Responsible Publishing relate to diamond open access?
TRP treats diamond open access — publishing that is free to both authors and readers, typically run by scholar-led or institutional platforms — as a proof point that scholarly communication can work without per-article charges, and frames redirecting resource towards such infrastructure as a long-term goal.
Implications for Research Administrators and Institutions
For research offices, libraries and funders, TRP is not yet a mandate — it is a signal of direction that carries planning consequences well before any policy takes effect.
- Budget modelling: institutions that have built read-and-publish or transformative agreements around APC-equivalent spend should model what a partial shift of that spend towards diamond infrastructure funding would look like.
- Assessment reform: the consultation’s own finding — that journal prestige metrics still drive author behaviour — means research administrators supporting responsible research assessment (aligned with DORA-style commitments) are addressing a root cause TRP itself identifies, not a side issue.
- Author guidance: research offices advising on authorship and publication strategy should track which venues already operate open peer review or preprint-first workflows, since early adoption reduces future compliance friction if funder policy converges on TRP principles.
- Equity due diligence: institutions in LMICs, and those partnering with them, should note the consultation’s own caveat about underrepresentation and imposition risk when adopting TRP-aligned practices unilaterally.
These are exactly the kind of process and policy interpretation questions that sit within the remit of research administration teams tracking funder requirements ahead of formal rollout.
Outlook: What Happens Next
cOAlition S committed to publishing a full response to the consultation findings, working through what a revised proposal would mean in practice for its member funders. The direction of travel is clear even where the timeline for full implementation is not: preprints and open licensing first, open peer review next, and structural reform of funding flows and assessment incentives as the long-term goal. Institutions, publishers and scholarly societies with a stake in how scholarly communication is funded have a genuine window to shape that revision rather than simply react to it once finalised.
What distinguishes Towards Responsible Publishing from earlier reform pushes is its explicit acknowledgement that funder mandates alone cannot fix a system-level incentive problem — reform has to touch assessment, infrastructure funding and author behaviour simultaneously, or risk being another well-intentioned policy that the underlying prestige economy simply routes around.