Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A grant holder publishes in a fully OA journal with CC BY licensing to satisfy Plan S.
- Is an instance
An author deposits the accepted manuscript with zero embargo in a Plan S-compliant repository.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Publishing in a subscription journal with a 12-month embargo against Plan S funding terms.
- Not an instance
Choosing a CC BY-NC licence when CC BY is required by the funder.
Editorial commentary
Plan S was developed under the leadership of Robert-Jan Smits and Marc Schiltz with the European Research Council and major European funders, and announced in September 2018. It requires that, from January 2021 (the original January 2020 target was pushed back a year after a May 2019 revision made in response to community consultation), scholarly publications resulting from funded research be made openly available immediately upon publication under an open licence.
What the ten principles cover
Plan S is organised around ten principles. Among the most consequential: authors and their institutions retain copyright, with no transfer to a publisher; a CC BY (or equivalent) open licence is the default requirement; funders provide financial support for open-access publication costs, with those costs capped and standardised rather than left to an opaque market; compliance is available through one of three routes — publication in a fully OA journal or platform, deposit of the accepted manuscript in a compliant repository with no embargo, or publication under a qualifying transformative arrangement; and hybrid subscription journals are not compliant outside that transitional transformative-arrangement route.
How this differs from cOAlition S
Plan S is the policy document itself — the ten principles and their compliance logic. cOAlition S is the separate but closely related funder consortium that authored Plan S, governs its ongoing interpretation, and enforces it through tools like the Journal Checker Tool. This page describes the policy; see the cOAlition S entry for the consortium’s current strategic direction (Towards Responsible Publishing) and its 2024 decision to end dedicated funding for transformative agreements — those are decisions of the governing body, not changes to the ten Plan S principles themselves.
References
- coalition-s.org. Smits RJ, Pells R ‘Plan S for Shock’ (Ubiquity Press 2022). Wellcome Trust open-access policy.
Also known as
Plan S policy
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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