Plan S Principles

What is Plan S?

Plan S is an open access publishing initiative, launched in 2018, that aims to accelerate the transition to full and immediate open access to research outputs. Plan S has one target and ten principles, along with guidance for implementation.

The principles of Plan S include:

• all scholarly publications should be immediately open access immediately (no embargo);

• authors or institutions should retain copyright to their work;

• outputs must be published with a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-BY);

• research should be assessed on its intrinsic merit, not the publication venue;

• funders should not support Gold OA in hybrid journals, except via transformative agreements.

Plan S outlines three possible routes to compliance:

1. Publishing in fully Gold OA journals or platforms;
2. Green OA in repositories without embargo and with CC-BY;
3. Gold OA in hybrid journals via Transformative Agreements.

Plan S is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders including the European Commission, UKRI and the Wellcome Trust, who have agreed to implement the principles of Plan S together in a coordinated way.  cOAlition S funders have committed to implementing Plan S. The Plan S principles apply from 01 January 2021, but individual funders’ open access policies will differ in the date from which they apply. 

Plan S Rights Retention Strategy

Under the Plan S Rights Retention strategy, cOAlition S funders will change their grant conditions to require that a CC-BY licence is granted to all future research articles arising from grant funding - Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) or Version of Record (VoR), or to require that all research articles are licensed with CC-BY. This will give researchers supported by cOAlition S funders the freedom to publish in any journal they choose, whilst continuing to be able to comply with Plan S principles and their funder policy by making their work immediately open access with a CC-BY licence.