Plan S – quo vadis?

By Jan Velterop

Image: Pushparaj S via Unsplash.

In November 2025 the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) published an article in its journal Science, written by Jeffrey Brainard, with the following title: After Coalition S disrupted scientific publishing, new plan retreats from strict requirements.¹

cOAlition S (that’s how the coalition spells it) consists of a group of science funders who formulated a plan–Plan S, allegedly after its initiator, Robert-Jan Smits–to transform traditional scholarly journals into Open Access publications, aiming to ensure that publicly funded research would be available with Open Access immediately upon publication. Plan S was launched in 2018 and due to being implemented in January 2021. It was greeted with a degree of enthusiasm, but it soon encountered obstacles.

Compliance with the plan’s requirements was disappointing. This is neither new, nor surprising. Science communication is a complicated ecosystem and issues related to Open Access licensing, copyright-retention by authors, transition agreements with publishers, the level of APCs (Article Processing Charges, to be paid by or on behalf of authors), and more, kept, and still keep, cropping up.

The article in Science also had a sub-title: “The group’s latest strategy emphasizes consultation, lacks spending pledges.”

Spending pledges. This points to a fundamental question in science publishing: who pays and how much? In the traditional subscription system, it was almost exclusively libraries of universities an (industrial) research establishments which footed the bill. In the Open Access APC-funded system it is authors and their funders.

The logic of APC funding of publications is twofold: 1) APC’s make Open Access and unlimited dissemination possible, as publishers do not need to put content behind paywalls to protect subscription income; and 2) the prime beneficiaries of the publishing system are, arguably, researchers in their role of authors and not of readers of scholarly literature. It is on authors where the pressure lies. After all, the adage is “publish or perish”, not “read or rot”.

Therefore, the principle of putting the onus of sustaining the publishing system on the authors and their funders rather than on the libraries and readers makes sense. But there are practical problems. Let’s look at the levels of APCs.

Science publishing was extraordinarily lucrative. Particularly for the profit and surplus items on the balance sheet of respectively the larger publishers and the scientific societies with a publishing arm, were enviable. They calculated their income per article as follows: the entire subscription turnover in a given year was divided by the number of articles published in that year, in order to arrive at a per-article income.

In order to preserve the profit levels (or in the case of scholarly societies, the surplus levels) they were used to, the historical income per article became the basis for the APCs to be levied in an Open Access system. The trouble is that when APCs were first introduced by BioMed Central, their level was a mere fraction of what they became when traditional publishers entered the Open Access stage. Preserving their financial interests is obviously important to publishers, and the apparent lack of including spending pledges in the new strategic direction cOAlition S has taken for Plan S is thus a concern for them.

Plan S has moved away from promoting APC-supported Open Access and is moving toward developing a more ‘responsible’ and scholar-led Open Access structure. However, the specifics of the new approach are still to emerge. Ongoing initiatives focus on transparent fees, alternative publishing models, and addressing disparities, e.g. between one the one side well-funded researchers in richer countries and on the other less well-funded scientists in poorer countries, and un-funded ones anywhere. New recommendations and studies are expected to shape policy in the coming years. These efforts are said to be part of an evolving Open Science scene.

So far, Plan S’s compliance requirements proved to be unworkable for the vast majority of publishers. Is a more direct route to Open Access workable?

It has been suggested that it might

be more practical to just build on the existing work being done by an organisation like SciELO, which essentially invented the Open Access […] support network in the 1990s, and has been hugely successful with building a stable of high quality Open Access [journals] in Latin America since then.

Why not just create SciELO spinoff networks (or clones) for other regions of the world (with region-by-region focus and management, since every region requires unique familiarity and expertise—a global focus is too broad)?²

It goes without saying that I fully agree with that. Of course, the goal of Plan S remains to make all journal publication “diamond”. What “diamond” means in this context is that neither reading or publishing in journals should carry a cost to its users, be they researchers, or anybody else. What it does not mean is that a system like that is cost-free; it just means that such a system needs to be subsidised, and–probably–also not-for-profit. Who should come up with the subsidies remains a big question.

In that light, Plan U might offer an alternative way forward. Plan U³ is an idea formulated by Richard Sever, Michael Eisen, and John Inglis. The idea is simple and elegant: funders would require that any publication resulting from research they funded is first deposited on an open preprint platform, after which it may subsequently be submitted to a journal, if the latter is deemed necessary. Authors of unfunded research and thus not required by funders to do so could also make use of this system. If and when articles are subsequently submitted to journals, the contents of the manuscripts are already Open Access on preprint platforms so it doesn’t really matter whether the journals in question are Open Access (OA) or subscription-based.

The authors of Plan U assume that most preprints would subsequently be peer-reviewed. This doesn’t necessarily have to be done by journal editors. And in some cases, it may be considered unnecessary at all. But the recognition or approbation that comes with being accepted for publication by a journal that researchers are used to is unlikely to lose its significance in a hurry. Journal publications may be required for a job, for instance. And the perception of prestige as a result of being accepted by a journal with a high Impact Factor, may also yield the satisfaction of “bragging points”, before the article itself is even cited once.

The apparent need for prestige seems to me a vestige of an era in which scientific articles were being published by single authors. This is increasingly rare in many disciplines, where the collaborative nature of scientific work is reflected in multi-authorship, which rather dilutes the meaning of that sort of prestige for an individual. Great research results are rewards in themselves and worthy of pursuing; I doubt if pursuing prestige leads to better science. Besides, the absence of a strong desire for prestige may mitigate the effects of competition in science and stimulate more collaboration.

Plan S seems to try and “shoehorn” the traditional publishing structures into an Open Access boot. Plan U may have a better chance of making fundamental changes to the system, but seems to lack the organizational heft of cOAlition S. It would be good if cOAlition S were to take the principles of Plan U on board and integrate it into Plan S. If the network approach that has made SciELO successful (“It is the core of the SciELO success”⁴) is also added to the mix, it would be even better.

Notes

1. BRAINARD, J. After Coalition S disrupted scientific publishing, new plan retreats from strict requirements [online]. Science. 2025 [viewed 19 November 2025]. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.zp6a1kl. Available from: https://www.science.org/content/article/after-coalition-s-disrupted-scientific-publishing-new-plan-retreats-strict-requirements ↩

2. HAMPSON, G. EU ditches old Plan S, backs new Plan S’ [online]. The Science Communication Institute. 2024 [viewed 19 November 2025]. Available from: https://sci.institute/sci/analysis/2024/02/eu-backing-new-diamond-reform-model/ ↩

3. SEVER, R., EISEN, M. and INGLIS, J. Plan U: Universal access to scientific and medical research via funder preprint mandates. PLoS Biology. 2019, v. 17, no.6. [viewed 19 November 2025]. Available from: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000273 ↩

4. PACKER, A. The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of SciELO. In: EVE, M. P.; GRAY, J. Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. MIT Press Direct, 2020. Available from: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11885.001.0001 ↩

References

BRAINARD, J. After Coalition S disrupted scientific publishing, new plan retreats from strict requirements [online]. Science. 2025 [viewed 19 November 2025]. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.zp6a1kl. Available from: https://www.science.org/content/article/after-coalition-s-disrupted-scientific-publishing-new-plan-retreats-strict-requirements

HAMPSON, G. EU ditches old Plan S, backs new Plan S’ [online]. The Science Communication Institute. 2024 [viewed 19 November 2025]. Available from: https://sci.institute/sci/analysis/2024/02/eu-backing-new-diamond-reform-model/

PACKER, A. The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of SciELO. In: EVE, M. P.; GRAY, J. Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. MIT Press Direct, 2020. Available from: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11885.001.0001

SEVER, R., EISEN, M. and INGLIS, J. Plan U: Universal access to scientific and medical research via funder preprint mandates. PLoS Biology. 2019, v. 17, no.6. [viewed 19 November 2025]. Available from: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000273

External link

cOAlition S

About Jan Velterop

Image: Izi Gambash.

Johannes (Jan) Velterop, originally a marine geologist who made the transfer to science publishing. First to traditional science publishing (Elsevier, Academic Press, Nature), but since the year 2000 to Open Access publishing. Now retired, and continuing as an independent Open Access advocate.