Plan S
Plan S is a 2018 initiative by {{cOAlition S}}, a group of national research funders and philanthropies, requiring that research they fund be published in compliant {{Open Access}} venues with no embargo. The 'S' stands for 'shock', and the policy capped {{Article Processing Charge}}s, mandated author copyright retention, and phased out hybrid journals.
Plan S was announced in September 2018 by cOAlition S, a consortium of national research funders organized with Science Europe and the European Commission's open access envoy Robert-Jan Smits. The 'S' was variously glossed as 'shock', 'solution', 'speed', and 'science'. Its central demand: from 1 January 2021 onward, scholarly publications from research funded by member organizations must be published in Open Access journals or platforms, or deposited in OA repositories without an embargo. The policy was built around ten principles. Authors or their institutions retain copyright under open licenses such as CC BY. Publication fees should be standardized and capped, with funders covering the cost rather than individual researchers. Hybrid journals (subscription titles that also offer paid OA per article) were permitted only as a transitional arrangement until 2024 and only under 'transformative' agreements with a credible pivot to full OA. Signatories include national funders from countries such as the United Kingdom (UKRI), France (ANR), the Netherlands (NWO), Norway, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, Poland, Slovenia, Portugal, Ireland, Luxembourg, Jordan, and South Africa, along with major philanthropies including the Wellcome Trust, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The United States, India, China, Germany's DFG, and the European Research Council declined to join. Plan S was estimated to cover only about 6 percent of worldwide research articles, but a much higher share of high-profile output, including roughly a third of papers in Nature (journal) and Science. Large publishers including Springer Nature, Elsevier, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science initially resisted and later negotiated read-and-publish arrangements. In 2024, cOAlition S announced a new 'Towards Responsible Publishing' strategy, signaling that Plan S would evolve toward a community-controlled scholarly communication model rather than continue to fight publisher pricing on its own terms.