Plan S
Overview
Plan S is the open access framework requiring that publications arising from publicly funded research be made immediately and fully open access, without embargo, under an open licence. Launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, it is one of the most significant coordinated interventions in scholarly publishing in recent years. Plan S is articulated as a set of principles rather than a single legal instrument: the enforcement sits in each member funder’s own grant conditions, while Plan S itself is the shared normative framework those conditions implement. This is why it is a principles node rather than a policy: it informs and aligns the funders’ policies without itself carrying enforcement.
Principles
The ten Plan S principles cover licence requirements (immediate open access under a Creative Commons licence, typically CC BY), quality standards for open access platforms and repositories, transparency of publication pricing and contracts, and support for open access infrastructure over commercial lock-in.
Implementation mechanisms
The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) lets researchers retain copyright in their accepted manuscript by asserting a CC BY licence at submission, allowing deposit in an open repository even when the journal is not fully open access. Transformative agreements supported transitional read-and-publish arrangements with publishers as a temporary mechanism; cOAlition S ended financial support for these at the end of 2024, as originally committed. The Plan S Journal Checker Tool (https://journalcheckertool.org) lets researchers verify whether a specific journal is compliant with their funder’s Plan S implementation.
Compliant deposit
Plan S supports open access infrastructure over commercial platforms. OpenAIRE is a key technical partner for compliance monitoring. Zenodo, operated by CERN and OpenAIRE, is one of the primary Plan S compliant repositories, and the Rights Retention Strategy strengthens the role of subject and institutional repositories such as HAL, bioRxiv, and medRxiv as compliant deposit routes. EOSC-compatible repositories are accepted compliant destinations.
Connections
- governedBy: cOAlition S
- relatedTo: OpenAIRE (key technical partner for Plan S compliance monitoring)
- relatedTo: EOSC (Plan S supports EOSC-compatible repositories as compliant deposit destinations)
Resources
- https://www.coalition-s.org/plan_s_principles/ (the ten principles)
- https://journalcheckertool.org (Journal Checker Tool)
- https://www.coalition-s.org/rights-retention-strategy/ (Rights Retention Strategy)