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cOAlition S — Plan S

Overview

cOAlition S is an international consortium of research funding organisations that launched Plan S in September 2018 with the goal of making all research outputs from publicly funded research immediately and fully open access, without embargo. Coordinated by Science Europe and announced with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council, it is one of the most significant coordinated policy interventions in scholarly publishing in recent decades. Plan S is articulated as a set of principles rather than a single policy: funders commit to requiring that publications from their grants be immediately open access under a Creative Commons licence, and to not funding publication in journals that do not offer a compliant open access route.

Principles and Implementation

The ten Plan S principles cover licence requirements, quality standards for open access platforms and repositories, transparency of pricing and contracts, and support for open access infrastructure. Key implementation mechanisms include the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), through which researchers retain copyright in their accepted manuscript by asserting a CC BY licence at submission, allowing deposit in an open repository even if 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 arrangements at the end of 2024, as originally committed. The Plan S Journal Checker Tool (https://journalcheckertool.org) allows researchers to verify whether a specific journal is compliant with their funder’s Plan S implementation.

Member Funders

cOAlition S membership includes major European and international funders. ANR is the French national research funder, with its Plan S commitment embedded in ANR Open Science Policy. The European Research Council (ERC) is the EU flagship basic research funder, with its Plan S commitment embedded in EC Open Science Policy. UKRI (UK Research and Innovation), Wellcome Trust, NWO, and FWO are among other major members.

Relationship to Open Infrastructure

cOAlition S actively supports open access infrastructure over commercial platforms. The initiative funds and endorses OpenAIRE as a key technical implementation partner. Zenodo, operated by CERN and OpenAIRE, is one of the primary Plan S compliant repositories. The Rights Retention Strategy specifically encourages deposit in institutional repositories and subject repositories alongside or instead of publisher-hosted versions, strengthening the role of HAL in the French context and bioRxiv and medRxiv as compliant deposit routes.

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