From January 2025, cOAlition S stopped counting transformative agreements as compliant with Plan S by default, ending five years of tacit funder support for the mechanism that had allowed hybrid subscription journals to offer immediate open access under an interim licence. For publishers and institutions that had built entire open access strategies around read-and-publish deals, the shift is not academic. It forces a hard choice between converting to full open access, negotiating narrower independent agreements, or leaning more heavily on rights retention and repository deposit. Understanding the mechanics of a transformative agreement open access deal — and why funders have lost patience with it — is now essential for anyone managing compliance across a research portfolio.
The timing matters. Transformative agreements were always framed as a bridge, not a destination: a way to move subscription publishers toward full open access without an abrupt shock to library budgets or editorial pipelines. cOAlition S set an explicit end date for that bridge, and 2025 is when the funding underpinning it formally lapses for many participating publishers. Institutions that assumed renewal on the same terms are now recalculating budgets, contracts, and compliance monitoring in real time.
Why cOAlition S Withdrew Support for Transformative Agreements
Plan S, launched by a coalition of research funders including UKRI and several European national agencies, always treated the Plan S hybrid journal as a transitional category. Hybrid titles — subscription journals that also offer an open access option article by article — were permitted under transformative agreements only because those agreements included measurable, time-limited commitments to flip fully to open access. cOAlition S’s own monitoring found that too few agreements were delivering credible transition trajectories at the pace originally envisaged, and continuing to fund the intermediate step indefinitely risked entrenching hybrid publishing rather than ending it.
The practical effect from 2025 is that cOAlition S funders no longer treat compliance with a transformative agreement as automatically satisfying their open access policy. Authors funded by participating agencies must instead demonstrate compliance through one of the routes Plan S has always prioritised: publishing in a fully open access venue, publishing under an independently negotiated agreement that meets specific transparency and pricing criteria, or exercising rights retention to deposit the accepted manuscript in a repository regardless of the publisher’s own licensing terms.
The Practical Options: Full-OA, Independent Deals, and Rights Retention
For publishers, the most direct response is converting hybrid titles to fully open access — removing the subscription dependency entirely and pricing through article processing charges or diamond/no-fee models. This satisfies funders outright but carries real revenue risk for society and mid-sized publishers whose subscription base has not yet been replaced by APC income at scale.
A second route is the independently negotiated read-and-publish deal: an agreement that continues to bundle reading access with publishing rights, but which is renegotiated outside the cOAlition S monitoring framework, typically at institutional or consortium level with more explicit transition milestones and price transparency. Several national consortia are already restructuring deals along these lines rather than abandoning read-and-publish arrangements altogether.
The third, and arguably most consequential for institutions, is the cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy. Under rights retention, authors apply a Creative Commons licence to their accepted manuscript at submission — regardless of where they ultimately publish — and deposit that manuscript in an institutional or subject repository, satisfying an open access repository mandate even when the journal itself remains subscription-based or hybrid. This decouples compliance from publisher business models entirely, which is precisely why funders favour it as transformative agreements wind down. The Wellcome open access policy and the ERC open access policy have both moved in this direction, requiring immediate deposit with an open licence rather than accepting embargoed green open access as sufficient.
Metadata and Persistent Identifiers: Making Post-TA Workflows Auditable
Whichever route an institution favours, the compliance burden shifts from the publisher’s contract terms to the research office’s ability to prove, at the level of the individual output, which policy was satisfied and how. That is a metadata problem as much as a policy problem. Funders auditing compliance without a central transformative agreement to point to need reliable, machine-readable evidence: a CrossRef DOI carrying accurate licence and funding metadata, an ORCID iD linking the author to the funder award, a Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifier confirming the affiliated institution, and a repository record with a resolvable identifier showing date of deposit and applied licence.
This is where the infrastructure built around persistent identifiers earns its keep. A repository deposit under rights retention is only auditable if the manuscript record, the funder grant number, and the author identifier are all linked consistently — otherwise institutions cannot demonstrate compliance at scale across thousands of outputs, and funders cannot verify it either. DataCite-assigned identifiers for datasets and outputs, combined with ORCID and ROR, give institutions a way to generate compliance reports without relying on publisher-supplied dashboards that may disappear along with the agreement itself. Research offices that have invested in clean, well-populated metadata pipelines are considerably better positioned for this transition than those that treated identifier hygiene as a back-office afterthought.
What This Means for Research Administrators
Research administrators now need to treat open access compliance as a per-output audit trail rather than a portfolio-level contract. Practical priorities include:
- Auditing which current agreements are genuinely at risk of losing funder recognition in 2025 and beyond, and flagging affected corresponding authors early.
- Strengthening repository workflows so that rights-retention deposits happen at submission, not after acceptance, since embargo-based green open access no longer satisfies the strictest funder policies.
- Ensuring ORCID, ROR, and grant metadata are captured consistently at the point of manuscript submission, not reconstructed retrospectively for a funder audit.
- Briefing researchers, particularly early-career authors, on how rights retention interacts with journal submission terms, since some publishers still contest the strategy in their own author agreements.
- Reviewing consortium-level negotiating positions where independent read-and-publish deals are being pursued as a replacement for cOAlition S-recognised transformative agreements.
Institutions with mature research information management systems — those already aligned with standards from ORCID, DataCite, and CrossRef — will find this transition largely a configuration exercise. Those still relying on manual spreadsheets or publisher-reported compliance figures face a heavier lift, and a compressed timeline in which to build it.
A Bridge That Has Reached Its Far Bank
The end of cOAlition S funding for transformative agreements is not a retreat from open access — it is a signal that funders consider the transitional phase complete for a meaningful share of the market, and expect the sector to move to durable models: full open access, transparent independent agreements, or rights retention backed by repository deposit. The institutions and publishers that adapt fastest will be those that have already invested in the unglamorous infrastructure of identifiers and metadata, because that infrastructure is what turns a policy commitment into something a funder, an auditor, or a future researcher can actually verify.
As with the CRediT contributor role taxonomy — originated by CASRAI in 2014 and now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 — the lesson is consistent: standards and identifiers only deliver value once they are consistently applied across the research lifecycle. Post-transformative-agreement open access will be judged less on rhetoric and more on whether every output can be traced, licensed, and verified.
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