Plan S is Coming Soon

The cOAlition S will implement Plan S from January 1, 2021.

The cOAlition S is the initiative of a group of national research funding organizations that will make Open Access publishing mandatory in their funded projects from 2021. cOAltion S is supported by the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC).

The cOAlitions S has developed Plan S, which states that scientific publications from funded research must be published immediately in Open Access after the rules of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access.

Plan S sets out 10 principles. The most important points are:

  • Authors or their instituttions retain copyright.
  • Use of Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) is mandatory (or a similar license or a more open license).
  • There will be no more paywalls.
  • Immediate open access to scientific publications without embargoes should be guaranteed.
  • Publication in hybrid/mirror/sister journals is no longer permitted.

To fulfill the requirements of Plan S, authors can publish their scientific results in full Open Access journals. In addition, it will be possible to publish in so-called transformative journals in the coming years. Authors can also use the green road of Open Access to meet the requirements of Plan S. Therefore, authors can publish in journals that allow them to store the accepted author manuscript without embargo in our institutional repository MPG.PuRe. Please contact the library for assistance.

By the End of 2020, cOAlition S will implement a Plan S Journal Checker Tool. This offers the authors a helpful tool to decide in which journal the next publication, e. g. of results from an EU project, should take place.