# cOAlition S — Plan S ## Overview cOAlition S is an international consortium of research funding organisations that launched Plan S in September 2018 with the goal of making all research outputs from publicly funded research immediately and fully open access, without embargo. Coordinated by Science Europe and announced with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council, it represents the most significant coordinated policy intervention in scholarly publishing in the open access era. Plan S is articulated as a set of principles rather than a single policy: funders commit to requiring that publications from their grants be immediately open access under a Creative Commons licence, and to not funding publication in journals that do not offer a compliant open access route. ## Principles and Implementation The ten Plan S principles cover licence requirements, quality standards for open access platforms and repositories, transparency of pricing and contracts, and support for open access infrastructure. Key implementation mechanisms include: - **Rights Retention Strategy (RRS)**: researchers retain copyright in their accepted manuscript by asserting a CC BY licence at submission, regardless of the publisher's default terms; this allows deposit in an open repository even if the journal is not fully open access - **Transformative agreements**: funders support "read and publish" or "publish and read" agreements with publishers as a transitional mechanism, provided these agreements include a clear end date and a commitment to full open access - **Approved repositories**: Plan S recognises a set of approved open access repositories; [[Zenodo]], [[HAL]], [[OpenAIRE]] and institutional repositories with appropriate metadata and licence policies qualify - **Journal checker tool**: a public tool allowing researchers to verify whether a specific journal is compliant with their funder's Plan S implementation ## Member Funders cOAlition S membership includes major European and international funders. ANR is the French national research funder, with its Plan S commitment embedded in [[ANR Open Science Policy]]. The European Research Council (ERC) is the EU flagship basic research funder, with its Plan S commitment embedded in [[EC Open Science Policy]]. UKRI (UK Research and Innovation), Wellcome Trust, NWO, and FWO are among other major members. ## Relationship to Open Infrastructure cOAlition S actively supports open access infrastructure over commercial platforms. The initiative funds and endorses [[OpenAIRE]] as a key technical implementation partner. [[Zenodo]], operated by CERN and [[OpenAIRE]], is one of the primary Plan S compliant repositories. The Rights Retention Strategy specifically encourages deposit in institutional repositories and subject repositories alongside or instead of publisher-hosted versions, strengthening the role of [[HAL]] in the French context and [[bioRxiv]]/[[medRxiv]] (see [[Preprint Servers]]) as compliant deposit routes. ## Connections - Secretariat: Science Europe - French implementation: [[ANR Open Science Policy]] - European implementation: [[EC Open Science Policy]], [[EOSC]] - Compliant repositories: [[Zenodo]], [[HAL]], [[OpenAIRE]], [[Recherche Data Gouv]] - Compliant preprint servers: [[Preprint Servers]] - Technical partner: [[OpenAIRE]] ## Resources - https://www.coalition-s.org - Journal checker tool: https://journalcheckertool.org - Rights Retention Strategy: https://www.coalition-s.org/rights-retention-strategy/