Plan S

Support for Plan S comes from cOAlition-S — a group of research funders that includes a host of mainly European national funding agencies, and some of the world's most influential private biomedical funders, such as the US organizations the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the London-based funder Wellcome. These funders were acknowledged on around 200,000 science papers published last year — around 5% of all research articles, but 12% of a selection of the most highly-cited journals, according to an analysis by citation-analytics firm Clarivate and DeltaThink, a consultancy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Plan S Principles are available here.

Scientists with grants from these funders must make resulting papers immediately free to read and publish them under a liberal license so that anyone can download, reuse or republish the paper. Researchers can publish their final paper OA in a journal, or they can make the accepted, peer-reviewed version of their manuscript available online in an approved repository. cOAlition S has rolled out a Journal Checker Tool to let researchers see their compliant publishing options for any journal.