Plan S is an initiative for
open-access science publishing launched in 2018 by "cOAlition S",
a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries. The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in
open repositories or in
journals that are available to all by 2021.
The "S" stands for "shock".
Per 2017 figures, the mandate of Plan S will cover about 6% of worldwide research articles, including about one third of articles in ''
Nature
Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...
'' and ''
Science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
''. Major publishers have been planning to accommodate this mandate by offering (or allowing)
open access options to authors.
Principles
The plan, launched in 2018, was structured around ten principles.
The key principle states that by 2021, research funded by public or private grants must be published in
open-access journals or platforms, or made immediately available in open access repositories without an
embargo. The ten principles are:
# authors should retain
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...
on their publications, which must be published under an open license such as
Creative Commons;
# the members of the coalition should establish robust criteria and requirements for compliant open access journals and platforms;
# they should also provide incentives for the creation of compliant open access journals and platforms if they do not yet exist;
# publication fees should be covered by the funders or universities, not individual researchers;
# such publication fees should be standardized and capped;
# universities, research organizations, and libraries should align their policies and strategies;
# for books and monographs,
the timeline may be extended beyond 2021;
# open archives and repositories are acknowledged for their importance;
#
hybrid open-access journals are not compliant with the key principle;
# members of the coalition should monitor and sanction non-compliance.
In October 2023, cOAlition S released a proposal that would "reimagine scientific publishing without any author fees" (
diamond open access).
Specific implementation guidance

A task force of Science Europe, led by
John-Arne Røttingen (
RCN) and David Sweeney (
UKRI), has developed a specific implementation guidance on the Plan S principles, released on 27 November 2018.
The development of the implementation guidance also drew on input from interested parties such as research institutions, researchers, universities, funders, charities, publishers, and civil society.
Transition period
During a transition period, it will remain permissible to publish in so-called ''transformative journals'', defined as hybrid journals that are covered by an agreement to become a full open-access venue.
The contracts of such transformative agreements need to be made publicly available (including costs), and may not last beyond 2023.
Green open access
Publishing in any journal will continue to be permissible subject to the condition that a copy of the
manuscript accepted by the journal, or the final
published article, will be deposited in an approved open-access repository (
green open access) with no embargo on access and with a
CC BY licence.
As part of the Rights retention strategy, Coalition S plans to override journal policies that would forbid this.
As of October 2021, this was done for over 500 works published in various venues.
Licensing and rights
To re-use scholarly content, proper attribution needs to be given to the authors, and publications need to be granted a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to share and adapt the work for any purpose, including commercially. Scholarly articles must be published under a
Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY 4.0, or alternatively CC BY-SA 4.0 Share-alike or CC0
Public Domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...
.
In particular, this allows them to be used in
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...
.
Mandatory criteria for open access journals and platforms
Open access journals and platforms need to meet the following criteria to be compliant with Plan S:
* All scholarly content must be immediately accessible upon publication without any delay and free to read and download, without any kind of technical or other form of obstacles.
* Content needs to be published under CC BY, CC BY-SA or CC0.
* The journal/platform must implement and document a solid review system according to the standards within the discipline, and according to the standards of the
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
* The journal/platform must be listed in the
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or be in the state of being registered.
* Automatic
article processing charge waivers for authors from low-income countries and discounts for authors from middle-income countries must be provided.
* Details about publishing costs (including direct costs, indirect costs and potential surplus) impacting the publication fees must be made transparent and be openly available on the journal website/publishing platform.
*
DOIs must be used as permanent identifiers.
* Long-term digital preservation strategy by deposition of content in an archiving programme such as
LOCKSS/CLOCKSS.
* Accessibility of the full text in a machine readable format (e.g.
XML /
JATS) to foster
Text and Data Mining (TDM).
* Link to raw data and code in external repositories.
* Provide high quality and machine readable article level metadata and cited references under a CC0 public domain dedication.
* Embed machine readable information on the open access status and the license of the article.
Mirror journals, where one part is subscription based, with the other part being open access, are considered to be de facto hybrid journals. Mirror journals are not compliant with Plan S unless they are a part of a transformative agreement.
Public feedback
The implementation guidance was open for general feedback until 8 February 2019. On 31 May 2019 the cOAlition S published an updated version of their implementation guidance in light of the feedback received during the consultation.
COAlition S
Some commentators have suggested that the adoption of Plan S in one region would encourage its adoption in other regions.
Member organisations
, organisations in the coalition behind Plan S included:
*
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...
:
National Health and Medical Research Council;
*
Austria
Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...
:
Austrian Science Fund;
*
Finland
Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...
:
Academy of Finland;
*France:
Agence nationale de la recherche;
*Ireland:
Science Foundation Ireland;
*Italy:
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare;
*
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...
: Québec Research Funds;
*
Luxembourg
Luxembourg, officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, is a landlocked country in Western Europe. It is bordered by Belgium to the west and north, Germany to the east, and France on the south. Its capital and most populous city, Luxembour ...
: ;
*
Netherlands
, Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
:
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research;
*
Norway
Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...
:
Research Council of Norway;
*
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...
:
National Science Centre;
*
Portugal
Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country on the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe. Featuring Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point in continental Europe, Portugal borders Spain to its north and east, with which it share ...
:
Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia;
*
Slovenia
Slovenia, officially the Republic of Slovenia, is a country in Central Europe. It borders Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the south and southeast, and a short (46.6 km) coastline within the Adriati ...
: ;
*
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...
:
South African Medical Research Council;
*Sweden: ;
Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte);
Vinnova.
*
Switzerland
Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...
:
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF);
*
Jordan
Jordan, officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. Jordan is bordered by Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south, and Israel and the occupied Palestinian ter ...
:
Higher Council for Science and Technology
*United Kingdom:
United Kingdom Research and Innovation;
Wellcome Trust
*United States:
Gates Foundation;
Howard Hughes Medical Institute;
Templeton World Charity Foundation
*
Zambia
Zambia, officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern and East Africa. It is typically referred to being in South-Central Africa or Southern Africa. It is bor ...
: National Science and Technology Council (NSTC)
International organizations that are members:
Aligning Science Across Parkinson's
Plan S is also supported by:
*
European Commission
The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...
,
*
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a list of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations which coordinates responses to international public health issues and emergencies. It is headquartered in Gen ...
Public figures
Robert-Jan Smits stepped down in March 2019
and later wrote a book about Plan S.
Johan Rooryck of Leiden University was appointed Open Access Champion by cOAlition S on 28 August 2019;
Organisations that withdrew or declined to join
In October 2018 the
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) made it clear that US federal funders would not be signing up to Plan S. In an interview with the American Institute of Physics published 30 April 2019, OSTP Director Kelvin Droegemeier stated with regard to Plan S: "One of the things this government will not do is to tell researchers where they have to publish their papers. That is absolutely up to the scholar who's doing the publication. There's just no question about that."
In 2018 Swedish Riksbank's Jubilee Fond (RJ) used to be a member, but left the coalition in 2019 after concerns about the timelines of Plan S.
On 25 October 2019,
Vijay Raghavan announced that India would not be joining cOAlition S, despite his supportive comments earlier in the same year.
The
European Research Council initially supported Coalition S in 2018,
but withdrew support in July 2020.
Reactions
Institutional reactions
The following institutional statements of support were issued:
*
African Academy of Sciences (AAS)
*
All European Academies (ALLEA)
* Chinese
Ministry of Science and Technology
* Confederation of Open Access Repositories
*
Council of Australian University Librarians and the
Australasian Open Access Strategy Group
* DARIAH-EU
*
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
* EU-Life
*
Eurodoc
*
European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)
*
European University Association
*
Faculty of 1000
* Fair Open Access Alliance Further detailed recommendations for the implementation of Plan S were published on 19 October 2018 by the board of the FOAA.
*
Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)
* Joint statement of 113 institutions from 37 nations and 5 continents, affirming that there is a strong alignment among the approaches taken by OA2020, Plan S, the Jussieu Call for Open science and bibliodiversity, and others to facilitate a full transition to immediate open access
*
League of European Research Universities (LERU)
*
Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER)
*
Marie Curie Alumni Association
*
National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)
*
National Natural Science Foundation of China
* National Science and Technology Library (NSTL), China
* National Science Library (NSL), China
* Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw)
*
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
*
OpenAIRE
*
SPARC Europe
*
Swedish Research Council
*
Young Academy of Europe
*
Young European Research Universities Network (YERUN)
* Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) endorsed on 25 October 2018 the main ambitions set out by the Plan S, namely the elimination of
paywalls, copyright retention, and the rejection of hybrid models of open access publishing.
DARIAH published recommendations for the practical implementation of the principles of the Plan S. DARIAH perceived a strong bias toward the
STEM perspective within the current principles of Plan S, and called for a broader range of publication funding mechanisms to better cover the situation for researchers in
the arts
The arts or creative arts are a vast range of human practices involving creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompass diverse and plural modes of thought, deeds, and existence in an extensive range of m ...
and
humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including Philosophy, certain fundamental questions asked by humans. During the Renaissance, the term "humanities" referred to the study of classical literature a ...
. DARIAH was established as a
European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in August 2014 and had 17 member countries and several cooperating partners in eight non-member countries.
*
European University Association (EUA) published on 7 September 2018 a statement in which it generally welcomed the Plan's ambitions to turn open access into reality by 2020, but stated that, while the plan developed a bold vision for the transition, it hinged on turning principles into practice.
* OA2020 Mainland China signatory libraries held a meeting on 26 March 2019 at the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing at which they clarified their position with regard to Plan S.
Reactions by researchers
Reactions included an Open Letter, signed by more than 1790 researchers, expressing their concerns about perceived unintended outcomes of the Plan if implemented as stated before the publication of the specific implementation guidance. Another Open Letter in support of mandatory open access was issued after the publication of the specific implementation guide, and had been signed by over 1,900 researchers by the end of 2018. However, it did not reference Plan S specifically.
Stephen Curry, a structural biologist and open access advocate at
Imperial College London, called the policy a "significant shift" and "a very powerful declaration".
Ralf Schimmer, head of the Scientific Information Provision at the
Max Planck Digital Library, told ''
The Scientist'' that "This will put increased pressure on publishers and on the consciousness of individual researchers that an ecosystem change is possible ... There has been enough nice language and waiting and hoping and saying please. Research communities just aren't willing to tolerate procrastination anymore."
Political activist
George Monbiot – while acknowledging that the plan was "not perfect" – wrote in ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' that the publishers' responses to Plan S was "ballistic", and argued that Elsevier's response regarding Wikipedia "inadvertently remind
dus of what happened to the commercial encyclopedias".
He said that, until Plan S is implemented, "The ethical choice is to read the stolen material published by
Sci-Hub."
Herpetologist
Malcolm L. McCallum suggested that science requires a diversity of publishing types to serve the needs of the entire scientific community.
Individual Plan S policies have also received a mixed reception from academics. For example, the Rights Retention Strategy has been enthusiastically promoted by Cambridge neuroscientist Stephen Eglen because it can be used by anyone to make their work open access. In contrast, computational biochemist Lynn Kamerlin criticized the Rights Retention Strategy because, while it would create obligations for grantees it was unclear whether it would create legal obligations for publishers. Similarly, Shaun Khoo has argued that the Rights Retention Strategy is a complex approach that creates an unrealistic burden for authors and may produce legal risk for authors, institutions and readers.
Reactions by journals and publishers
The plan was initially met with opposition from a number of publishers of non-open access journals, as well as from learned societies.
Springer Nature
Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macm ...
"urge
research funding agencies to align rather than act in small groups in ways that are incompatible with each other, and for policymakers to also take this global view into account", adding that removing publishing options from researchers "fails to take this into account and potentially undermines the whole research publishing system".
The
AAAS, publisher of the journal ''
Science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
'', argued that Plan S "will not support high-quality peer-review, research publication and dissemination", and that its implementation "would disrupt scholarly communications, be a disservice to researchers, and impinge academic freedom" and "would also be unsustainable for the ''Science'' family of journals".
Tom Reller of
Elsevier
Elsevier ( ) is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell (journal), Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, ...
said, "if you think that information should be free of charge, go to Wikipedia".
On 12 September 2018
UBS repeated their "sell" advice on Elsevier (RELX) stocks. Elsevier's share price fell by 13% between 28 Aug and 19 September 2018.
According to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (
OASPA), whose aim is to transform the business model of the largest publishers (by supporting projects like
Project DEAL), Plan S puts smaller and emerging fully
open access publishers at a competitive disadvantage, and potentially harms their prospects. Pure "gold" open access publishers may be put out of business by incentivizing authors to publish with large publishers which have the market power to negotiate their transition plans with funders, while no incentives are provided to authors to publish with smaller fully open access publishers and scholarly societies.
Policy changes by journals and publishers
On 28 November 2018 the journal ''
Epidemiology and Infection'' published by
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...
announced that it would convert to the open access model of publication from 1 January 2019, citing changed funder policies and Plan S.
On 8 April 2020,
Springer Nature
Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macm ...
announced that many of its journals, including ''
Nature
Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...
'', would become compatible with Plan S by publishing open access articles from 2021 and committing to an eventual transition to full open access.
On 15 January 2021, the
AAAS, which publishes ''Science'', announced a trial OA policy that accommodates Plan S's green open access rules.
This policy allows the distribution of an article's accepted version under a free license, without embargo and without charge. However, this is only permitted to authors who are under mandates by their Coalition S funders.
In February 2021, more than 50 publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley and Springer Nature, announced their opposition to the rights retention strategy of Coalition S. More specifically, Springer Nature announced their intention to override that strategy by making authors sign a license to that effect.
Policy changes by member organizations
In 2024, the
Gates Foundation announced a "preprint-centric" open access policy, and their intention to stop paying article-processing charges. This policy is not “entirely in line with cOAlition S”, because it does not mandate that an accepted manuscript be openly accessible.
See also
*
Open science
*
Project DEAL
*
Couperin
References
Further reading
*
* Caroline Winter (9 November 2018)
"Plan S and cOAlition S"Open Scholarship Policy Observatory
External links
*
*
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)**
Plan S: Making Open Access a Reality by 2020(pdf). Slides by Robert-Jan Smits (2019).
*
*
{{Academic publishing
Academic publishing
Intellectual property activism
Open access projects
2021 in science
Pan-European organizations