Plan S revised guidelines released
Following an extensive consultation exercise, the group of funders known as cOAlition S has released revised implementation guidelines for Plan S. Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing that was unveiled in September 2018, and is committed to “making full and immediate Open Access a reality”. The revised Plan S guidelines retain the fundamental principles as originally announced, but in order to provide more time for researchers and publishers to adapt to the changes under Plan S, the timeline has been extended by one year to 2021.
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| cOAlition S website: https://www.coalition-s.org/ |
We fully support the aims of Plan S, and welcome the new guidelines which have taken around 600 responses into account. A full account of the rationale behind the changes can be found at: https://www.coalition-s.org/rationale-for-the-revisions/
Plan S will still require all scholarly articles that result from research funded by members of cOAlition S to be made openly available upon publication, with three possible routes:
- Published in fully Open Access venues (journals or platforms)
- Publication in subscription venues with OA via deposit in a repository
- Publishing in journals with a ‘transformative agreement’
For any route, publications will need to be openly available with no embargo and with a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY) by default, although exceptions may be agreed by specific funders when they ultimately announce their policies. There will also be more emphasis on changing the research reward and incentive system: cOAlition S funders support the principles of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and explicitly commit to adapt the criteria by which they value researchers and scholarly output.
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| Plan S Compliance: https://www.coalition-s.org/principles-and-implementation/ |
We are pleased to see strong support for repositories with the statement “cOAlition S strongly encourages the deposition of all publications in a repository, irrespective of the chosen route to compliance.
Full Plan S principles and implementation guidelines are available at: https://www.coalition-s.org/principles-and-implementation/