What is Plan S, what is the point?

Plan S is a set of principles designed by a group called cOAlition S that support and promote the benefits of Open Access and aim to facilitate full and immediate Open Access for funded research as soon as possible. They put the responsibility primarily on Publishers and Funders to change behaviours that have so far limited the take up of Open Access.  

Who is behind this?

cOAlition S is a group of national research funding organisations, led by Science Europe, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council.

Represented by UKRI for the UK, a wide range of other countries national funders have also joined: Austria, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, Jordan, Zambia. International funders Wellcome Trust, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have also joined and show their full support.

What does it involve?

From 1 January 2021 the Principles of Plan S will come into force. In short, if your work is funded by a call that is published after 1 January 2021, any publications must be published in an Open Access venue or made openly and immediately available in an Open Access repository (like GALA) with no embargo.

Plan S provide 10 principles which can be found on their website.

But they basically break down to the following:

Your Funders:

• Funders will lead the development of the criteria that Open Access journals, platforms and repositories must follow. This includes providing incentives to establish and support the development of new journals and platforms where there is a need.
• This support also extends to Open Access publication fees (when required), which should also be covered by the Funders where possible.
• Funders will support a diversity of business models for publishing Open Access, but they must also ensure that any APCs are value for money.
• Funders will not support ‘hybrid’ model journals who charge both APCs and subscriptions for the same content. However, they may support journals that are in transition away from ‘hybrid’ to another model if there is a fixed deadline for the change.
• Funders will monitor and sanction non-compliance.
• Funders will make a commitment to responsible metrics, and no longer use anything other than the intrinsic merit of the work itself to assess supporting outputs in bids, stopping all use of Impact Factor (IF) or the knowledge of who published a paper.

Your Publishers/Journals:

• Authors must be able to retain copyright of their publications and use CC-BY licenses to enable reuse.
• All authors should be able to publish their work Open Access – there must be a variety of options available, individual researchers should not have to pay their own APCs

Other

• Funders, Publishers, universities, libraries… all should be working together to align policies and make processes transparent.
• The principles apply to everything, but cOAlition S acknowledge that putting processes in place for books and monographs will take significantly longer and as such the January 2021 deadline does not apply. A separate document will be provided in 2021.

How will this affect me? What do I need to do?

For now, you need to watch this space! As the funders and publishers make changes and updates to their policies and processes in the lead up to 2021, there will be more information available about which journals will comply with Plan S and in which way.

As it stands, for research funded by calls after January 2021, your outputs will need to be Open Access, either in an Open Access Journal, by paying an APC, or being put in the repository with no embargo.