CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: UKRI open access

  • cOAlition S Members in 2026: Which Funders Still Mandate Immediate Open Access

    cOAlition S is a coalition of 28 national research funders, charitable foundations, and international agencies that endorse Plan S, the requirement that publications from funded research be made openly accessible without embargo. Not every one of those coalition s members still enforces that requirement in the same way. Some, like UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Wellcome Trust, still apply the Rights Retention Strategy to force immediate access regardless of publisher policy. Others — most visibly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — have adopted 2024-era policies that no longer mandate an openly accessible accepted manuscript, and the coalition itself formally broadened its accepted routes to compliance under its 2026-2030 strategy, published 12 November 2025.

    cOAlition S is an informal alliance of research funders and research-performing organisations, launched in September 2018, that coordinates funding conditions requiring full and immediate open access to the peer-reviewed publications it supports. This article gives the current 2026 roster, distinguishes funders that still hold a full immediate-OA mandate from those that have relaxed enforcement, and explains what changed under the coalition’s newest strategic phase.

    Contents

    Who are the current cOAlition S members?

    cOAlition S began in 2018 with twelve founding organisations. According to the coalition’s own Strategy 2026-2030 document, that founding group “has developed into a robust network of 28 funders, encompassing agencies from Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa, and Australia.” The European Research Council (ERC) engaged at launch but formally withdrew support in July 2020.

    Founding and long-standing members include UKRI and Wellcome Trust (UK), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Science Foundation Ireland, Luxembourg’s Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR), Poland’s National Science Centre (NCN), Portugal’s Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), the Research Council of Norway, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, the South African Medical Research Council, Jordan’s Higher Council for Science and Technology, Zambia’s National Science and Technology Council, and US philanthropic funders including the Gates Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Templeton World Charity Foundation.

    Which funders still hold a full immediate open-access mandate?

    A small group of cOAlition S members still enforces the original, strict version of Plan S: immediate open access with no embargo, secured through the Rights Retention Strategy, which requires grantees to apply a CC BY licence to the author accepted manuscript regardless of what the publisher’s own copyright policy says.

    • UKRI requires a CC BY-licensed accepted manuscript deposited with no embargo (or a compliant gold route), enforced through its funding assurance processes.
    • Wellcome Trust applies its own Rights Retention Statement, requiring immediate open access on acceptance.
    • National European funders such as FWF, ANR, NWO, and SNSF have kept their domestic OA policies aligned with the coalition’s founding principles.

    The coalition’s commissioned review, Galvanising the open access community: A study on the impact of Plan S (2024), credits the Rights Retention Strategy as the mechanism with the most “game-changing effect,” since institutions have since adopted it independently, beyond the original funder mandate.

    Which members have relaxed enforcement?

    The clearest case of a member funder relaxing its own mandate is the Gates Foundation. In 2024 it announced a “preprint-centric” open access policy and confirmed it would stop paying article processing charges (APCs). Per Wikipedia’s sourced summary of the change, this policy is “not entirely in line with cOAlition S,” because it no longer requires that an accepted manuscript itself be made openly accessible — it instead relies on preprint deposit, which is a materially weaker guarantee than the coalition’s founding immediate-OA principle.

    Two organisations exited or declined the coalition outright rather than relaxing in place:

    • Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden) was a member in 2018 but left in 2019 over concerns about Plan S’s implementation timeline.
    • India publicly declined to join cOAlition S in October 2019, despite earlier supportive signals from its Department of Biotechnology.
    • The European Research Council withdrew its formal backing in July 2020, even though the European Commission remains engaged with the coalition’s wider work.

    Separately, cOAlition S confirmed in 2024 that it would end financial support for “transformative agreements” altogether, removing 1,589 of 2,326 journals (68%) from its transformative journals scheme in 2023. That decision tightened one enforcement lever even as the coalition’s broader 2026-2030 strategy loosened others — illustrating that “enforcement” at cOAlition S is not moving in a single direction.

    Funder-by-funder status at a glance

    Funder 2026 status Basis
    UKRI (United Kingdom) Full mandate, active Rights Retention Strategy; no-embargo CC BY requirement
    Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom) Full mandate, active Own Rights Retention Statement
    FWF, ANR, NWO, SNSF (Austria, France, Netherlands, Switzerland) Full mandate, active Domestic OA policy aligned to founding principles
    Gates Foundation (United States) Relaxed in 2024 Preprint-centric policy; APCs no longer funded; accepted manuscript OA not required
    Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden) Departed 2019 Left over Plan S implementation timeline
    European Research Council Withdrew support, 2020 Formal withdrawal in July 2020
    India (Department of Biotechnology) Never joined Declined membership, October 2019

    What changed under the 2026-2030 strategy?

    cOAlition S published its Strategy 2026-2030 on 12 November 2025, organised around three priorities: strengthening the foundations for “full, immediate, sustainable, and equitable” open access; supporting shared digital infrastructure (including a joint position on AI training uses of CC BY content); and exploring financially sustainable publishing models.

    Chemistry World’s reporting on the strategy quotes Lidia Borrell-Damián, chair of the coalition’s executive steering group and secretary general of Science Europe, describing a shift toward embracing “a range of open access models” — including publish-review-curate (PRC), diamond open access, and preprints — rather than insisting on one route. Researcher commentary quoted in the same piece characterised this as the coalition “scaling back its ambitions” from the original single 2021 target of full immediate Gold/Green access. Per the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) OA Dashboard, cited in that coverage, the global share of articles published immediately open access (gold) rose from 14% in 2014 to 40% in 2024, while subscription-only publication fell from 70% to 54% over the same decade.

    The coalition also changed its own governance in this period. In December 2025 it issued a tender for a new host secretariat, backed by an annual budget of roughly €0.8 million, after the European Science Foundation’s hosting arrangement wound down. Curt Rice — previously rector of two Norwegian universities — was appointed cOAlition S’s new director in May 2026, with Operas confirmed as the new host secretariat managing the coalition’s funds and communications.

    What does this mean for institutions and researchers?

    Research administrators advising authors funded by a cOAlition S member should not assume uniform enforcement across the roster. UKRI- and Wellcome-funded authors still face a hard Rights Retention requirement with no embargo tolerance. Gates Foundation-funded authors now face a materially different, preprint-centric expectation. The coalition’s collective policy language has shifted from “full and immediate” as the only route toward a “multitude of routes to open access” — compliance officers should check each funder’s own published policy rather than treating the cOAlition S label as a proxy for one uniform rule.

    For research administration teams tracking funder compliance, and for anyone verifying open access terminology in the CASRAI dictionary, the practical takeaway is that “cOAlition S member” is now a looser designation of shared principle rather than a guarantee of identical mandate terms.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What is cOAlition S?

    cOAlition S is an alliance of national research funders, charitable foundations, and international agencies, launched in September 2018, that coordinates Plan S — the requirement that publications from the research they fund be made openly accessible without embargo, typically via the Rights Retention Strategy.

    How many funders are in cOAlition S in 2026?

    cOAlition S counts 28 member funders as of its 2026-2030 strategy, spanning Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa, and Australia, up from the twelve founding organisations that launched Plan S in 2018.

    Have any funders left cOAlition S?

    Yes. Riksbankens Jubileumsfond left in 2019 over Plan S’s timeline, India declined to join in 2019, and the European Research Council withdrew formal support in July 2020, though the European Commission remains engaged.

    Is Plan S still mandatory for cOAlition S members in 2026?

    Core members such as UKRI and Wellcome Trust still enforce immediate open access with no embargo, but the coalition’s 2026-2030 strategy formally recognises additional routes — preprints, diamond open access, and publish-review-curate models — alongside the original mandate, rather than treating “full and immediate” as the only compliant route.

    Looking ahead

    With Curt Rice now leading the coalition and Operas installed as host secretariat, cOAlition S enters 2026-2027 — the first phase of its new strategy — with a wider tent of acceptable open access routes than it had in 2018. The roster of 28 funders remains largely intact, but “cOAlition S member” increasingly describes a shared aspiration rather than one uniform compliance rule. Institutions should track each funder’s own published policy directly rather than inferring mandate strength from coalition membership alone.

  • 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.