cOAlition S has published a revised Plan S Principles and Implementation Guidelines.

cOAlition S is a group of (mainly European) public and private charity research funders who want to accelerate the transition to open access through the adoption of a common strategy, called Plan S, that will require full and immediate Open Access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from the research they fund.

The details of the plan have changed quite a bit in response to a large volume of feedback from the community (including COAR’s input on December 13, 2018 and February 6, 2019). In particular, the start date for Plan S compliance has been moved to January 1, 2021, and several of the compliance requirements for both journals and repositories have been reduced.

COAR is pleased to see that repositories are included in Plan S as equal and legitimate mechanisms for compliance. Furthermore, as was suggested by COAR and others, the implementation requirements for compliant repositories are now much less onerous than in the original draft, and should be fairly manageable for repositories to implement. The requirements mainly focus on the inclusion of appropriate metadata for articles: Persistent identifier, machine-readable licenses, access status, and funder information. Those repositories that have already adopted the OpenAIRE guidelines, or another regional variation, are already close to being Plan S compliant.

We wanted to highlight a couple of other things for you, related to the role of repositories:

  • No embargoes: Publications resulting from research funded by cOAlition S members’ grants under calls published as of 1 January 2021 (or earlier at individual members’ choice), must be published in Open Access venues (journals or platforms) or made openly and immediately available in an Open Access repository (the final published version or the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM)
  • Open licenses: All publications must be published under an open and machine readable license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY)

In addition, other mandatory criteria for repositories are as follows:

  • Registration with OpenDOAR Directory (or in the process of being registered)
  • Use of persistent identifiers for the deposited versions of the publications (DOI -preferable, URN, or Handle)
  • Non-proprietary metadata under a CC0 public domain dedication, which include PIDs, the Open Access status, and the license of the deposited version, and funder information (funder name/ID and grant/project number)
  • Machine readable information on the Open Access status and the license embedded in the article, in standard non-proprietary format.
  • Continuous availability of compliant repositories.
  • Email address for contacting the repository (or more robust help desk functionalities)

There are also several “strongly recommended additional criteria”.

COAR is committed to helping our members and the repository community ensure repositories can adhere with Plan S, and we will be working with other partners, including the open source repository systems, to support compliance.

In addition, we will be reviewing the Plan S requirements in more detail and keep you informed about any other issues of relevance for our community.