European funders announce ambitious open access target

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11 funding bodies promise to ban grantees from publishing in pay-walled journals by 2020

A group of 11 European funding bodies known as Coalition S has pledged to ensure all the scientific research they support is published in ‘full, immediate’ open access journals by 2020.

The coalition and its plan – Plan S – were put together by the organisation Science Europe and the European commission’s open access envoy Robert-Jan Smits, the former director-general of research and innovation at the commission.