Plan S

During a transition period, publishing in a hybrid journal that is covered by a transformative agreement to become a full open-access venue will remain permissible.[8] The contracts of such transformative agreements need to be made publicly available (including costs), and may not last beyond 2023.[6]

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.[8]

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.[6]

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, with one part being subscription based and 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.

The implementation guidance was open for general feedback until 8 February 2019.[9] On 31 May 2019 the cOAlition S published an updated version of their implementation guidance in light of the feedback received during the consultation.[10]

Organisations in the coalition behind Plan S include:[12]

• Austria: Austrian Science Fund;
• Finland: Academy of Finland;[13]
• France: Agence nationale de la recherche;
• Ireland: Science Foundation Ireland;
• Italy: Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare;
• Luxembourg: Luxembourger National Research Fund;
• Netherlands: Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research;
• Norway: Research Council of Norway;
• Poland: National Science Centre;
• Slovenia: Slovenian Research Agency;
• Sweden: Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas);Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte);[12] Vinnova.[14]
• Jordan:[15] Higher Council for Science and Technology[16][17]
• United Kingdom: United Kingdom Research and Innovation; Wellcome Trust[18]
• United States: Gates Foundation.[18][19]
• Zambia: National Science and Technology Council (NSTC)[20]

International organizations that are members:

• Aligning Science Against Parkinson[21][22]

Plan S is also supported by:

• European Commission,[23] including the European Research Council;[24]
• World Health Organization[25]

Professor Johan Rooryck of Leiden University was appointed Open Access Champion by cOAlition S on 28 August 2019;[26] he replaced Robert-Jan Smits, who stepped down in March 2019.[27]

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,[28] 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."

Swedish Riksbank's Jubileee Fond (RJ) used to be a member,[29] but left the coalition after concerns about the timelines of Plan S.[30]

On 25 October 2019, Vijay Raghavan announced that India would not be joining cOAlition S,[31] despite his supportive comments earlier in the same year.[15]

• Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft;[32]
• Swiss National Science Foundation;[33]
• Swedish Research Council;[34]
• Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT);[35]
• Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER);[36]
• League of European Research Universities (LERU);[37]
• European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO);[38]
• EU-Life;[39]
• Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw);[40]
• European University Association;[41]
• Marie Curie Alumni Association[42]
• SPARC Europe;[43]
• Confederation of Open Access Repositories;[44][45]
• Fair Open Access Alliance;[46]
• Eurodoc[42]
• Young Academy of Europe[47][42]
• Young European Research Universities Network (YERUN)[48]
• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA);[49]
• DARIAH-EU[50]
• OpenAIRE;[51]
• Faculty of 1000;[52]
• 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.[53][54]
• National Science Library (NSL), China;[55]
• National Science and Technology Library (NSTL), China;[55]
• National Natural Science Foundation of China;[55]
• Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology;[55][56]
• All European Academies (ALLEA);[57]
• African Academy of Sciences (AAS);[58]
• National Institute for Health Research (NIHR);[59]
• Council of Australian University Librarians and the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group[60]

The plan was initially met with opposition from a number of publishers of non-open access journals, as well as from learned societies.[61] Springer Nature "urge[d] 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".[62] The AAAS, publisher of the journal Science, 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".[62][63] Tom Reller of Elsevier said, "if you think that information should be free of charge, go to Wikipedia".[64]

On 12 September 2018 UBS repeated their "sell" advice on Elsevier (RELX) stocks.[65] Elsevier's share price fell by 13% between 28 Aug and 19 September 2018.[66]

On 28 November 2018 the journal Epidemiology and Infection published by Cambridge University Press announced that it would convert to the open access model of publication from 1 January 2019, citing changed funder policies and Plan S.[67]

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.[68]

On 8 April 2020, Springer Nature announced that many of its journals, including Nature, would become compatible with Plan S by publishing open access articles from 2021 and committing to an eventual transition to full open access.[69]

Reactions included an Open Letter, signed by more than 1500 researchers, expressing their concerns about perceived unintended outcomes of the Plan if implemented as stated before the publication of the specific implementation guidance.[70] 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.[71][72]

Stephen Curry, a structural biologist and open access advocate at Imperial College London, called the policy a "significant shift" and "a very powerful declaration".[62] 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."[63] Political activist George Monbiot – while acknowledging that the plan was "not perfect" – wrote in The Guardian that the publishers' responses to Plan S was "ballistic", and argued that Elsevier's response regarding Wikipedia "inadvertently remind[ed] us of what happened to the commercial encyclopedias".[73] He said that, until Plan S is implemented, "The ethical choice is to read the stolen material published by Sci-Hub."[73]

On 25 October 2018, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) endorsed 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.[50] DARIAH published recommendations[74] 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 and humanities. DARIAH was established as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in August 2014 and as of 1 January 2019 had 17 member countries and several cooperating partners in eight non-member countries.[75] Further detailed recommendations for the implementation of Plan S were published on 19 October 2018 by the board of the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA).[76]

On 7 September 2018 the European University Association (EUA) published 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.[77]

On 26 March 2019, the OA2020 Mainland China signatory libraries held a meeting at the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing at which they clarified their position with regard to Plan S.[78]