Plan S compliance: what funded researchers must check before submitting
For researchers funded by a cOAlition S member, open access is a grant condition rather than a preference — and the condition attaches to the article, the licence and the repository, not just to the journal.
What Plan S is
Plan S is an initiative launched in 2018 by a group of national and charitable research funders who now operate as cOAlition S. Its core requirement is that peer-reviewed publications arising from funded research must be made openly available immediately on publication, with no embargo.
It applies through your funder's grant conditions, so the authority is the funder's policy page, not any general summary — including this one. Membership and the details of individual policies change; check yours directly.
The three compliant routes
Under Plan S, a funded article can comply in one of three ways.
- Publish in a fully open-access journal or platform. The version of record is open immediately under an open licence. 5,990 of the 11,447 journals we track are open access.
- Deposit in an open repository. Publish wherever you like, including a subscription journal, and deposit the accepted manuscript or version of record in a compliant repository, open immediately with no embargo.
- Publish in a transformative arrangement. A journal covered by a qualifying transformative agreement — see Read & Publish agreements. Funder support for this route has been progressively narrowed, so verify it still applies to your grant.
The licence requirement
This is the part most often missed. Compliance is not only about access but about reuse rights: the default requirement is CC BY, with some funders permitting CC BY-SA or, on request, CC0.
A journal that makes your article free to read under a more restrictive licence — CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND — may still leave you non-compliant. “Free to read” and “openly licensed” are different claims, and the second is the one being tested.
Where we hold a DOAJ record, the declared licence appears on the journal page. Confirm it against the journal's own author guidelines before submitting, since licence options sometimes vary by article type.
Rights retention
cOAlition S funders generally require grantees to retain sufficient rights to make the accepted manuscript openly available immediately, regardless of what the publisher's agreement says. In practice this means adding a statement to the manuscript on submission asserting that a CC BY licence applies to the author accepted manuscript.
The mechanism matters because it makes route two viable even where a publisher would otherwise impose an embargo. Your funder publishes the exact wording to use; add it at submission, not later.
What to check before you submit
- Is your funder a cOAlition S member? Check coalition-s.org and then your own grant agreement.
- Which route are you using? Decide before submission, because it affects the journal choice and the wording you include.
- Does the journal offer a compliant licence? CC BY unless your funder says otherwise.
- Is there an embargo? Any embargo on the route you are relying on breaks compliance.
- Who pays? Note that Plan S funders generally do not cover APCs in hybrid subscription journals outside a qualifying agreement.
- Does your institution hold an agreement? Check before paying anything — see transformative agreements.
Which funders this affects
cOAlition S includes national research councils across Europe, several major charitable funders of biomedical research, and some international and intergovernmental bodies. The European Commission has aligned Horizon Europe's open-access terms closely with the same principles.
Two practical consequences. First, if you hold a grant from a large European public funder or a major medical research charity, assume the rules apply until you have checked otherwise. Second, membership and individual policies have changed repeatedly since 2018 — some funders have adjusted their stance on the transformative route, and some have revised timelines. Read your own funder's current page rather than relying on what was true when you last submitted.
Multi-funder projects take the strictest applicable condition. If one funder requires CC BY with no embargo, that governs the paper regardless of what the others permit.
Price transparency
A less-discussed strand of Plan S is the requirement that publishers disclose what their charges pay for. The Journal Comparison Service was established so institutions could see publishers' own breakdowns of services and pricing before negotiating.
The reason this matters to an individual author is that APCs vary by roughly an order of magnitude for editorially comparable work — from journals charging nothing to a maximum of $12,690 across our directory, against a median of $3,140. Very little of that spread is explained by anything you can observe as an author, which is the argument for transparency in the first place. Compare figures directly in the APC finder.
What non-compliance actually means
Funders monitor compliance through grant reporting, and the consequences are administrative rather than dramatic: the publication may not count toward the grant's reported outputs, you may be asked to remedy it by depositing a manuscript, and repeated failure can be considered in future funding decisions. Some funders will decline to pay charges retrospectively for a non-compliant route.
Most non-compliance is discovered late, when the article is already published and the licence is fixed. That is why every check on this page belongs before submission.
A common and expensive mistake
Paying a hybrid APC in a subscription journal, from grant funds, in the belief that paying for open access is automatically compliant. Under most cOAlition S policies the hybrid route is not funded, so the researcher can end up having spent several thousand dollars from the grant and still needing to deposit a manuscript to comply.
The safe order is: confirm the route, confirm the licence, confirm who pays — then submit.