Seven years ago, Coalition S launched with the ambitious aim of making all research its backers funded freely accessible without subscription or paywalls by 2021. This was its Plan S. At the time, Coalition S’s declaration was highly influential as the organisation was set up by an international consortium of scientific charities and major research funders from across Europe and North America. Coalition S’s new strategy for the next five years takes a more flexible approach, embracing a range of open access (OA) models and plans to monitor investment, fairness and sustainability – a step back from its original highly ambitious goal.
While Coalition S did not achieve its 2021 target, the numbers of papers being published open access has increased. Between 2014–2024, the share of articles, reviews and conference papers published immediately with unrestricted access (gold open access) increased by 26% to 40%, according to the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers. Gold is the dominant open access model accounting for over 1.5 million articles. These are free to read but incur article processing charges (APCs) that must be paid by authors. Over the same period, the share of publications available to read via subscription only fell from 70% to 54%.
Gold open access sees the final versions of research articles published immediately with unrestricted and free access for readers. Authors, their institutions or research funders pay article processing charges (APCs) to cover publishing costs.
Green or self-archiving open access allows authors to deposit a version of their manuscript – usually a preprint or post-print – in an institutional repository or subject-based archive. It is made freely available, often after an embargo period defined by the publisher. Authors are not required to pay fees. However, the publicly accessible version may not be the final formatted article published by the journal.
Bronze represents publications that are made free-to-read on the publisher’s website but don’t qualify as gold because access is for a limited time, the licence is unclear or is not a Creative Commons one.
Hybrid journals apply traditional subscription fees, but authors have the option to make individual articles open access by paying an APC. This means that some articles are free to read, while others require a subscription.
Diamond or platinum refers to journals that provide immediate open access without charging authors a fee. Universities, scholarly societies or government funding often pay the publishing costs. Many society-run journals and university presses follow the diamond model.
Lidia Borrell-Damián, chair of the Coalition S executive steering group and secretary general of Science Europe, says an independent study confirms that Plan S has moved open access up policymakers’ agendas and brought publishers to the negotiating table. ‘It highlights the potentially game-changing effect of the rights retention strategy [a mechanism to make immediate open access the default scholarly communications standard], which institutions have since expanded into their own rights retention policies. It also notes the contribution to current momentum around diamond OA [no APCs], and the role of Coalition S in raising awareness of the inequities of article-based charging models.’
However, she accepts that the publishing environment is more complex than initially anticipated. Challenges include the rise of APCs, which can be prohibitively expensive for some researchers, and rapid advances in artificial intelligence, which have raised concerns about research integrity and trustworthiness.
A five-year plan for Coalition S
Coalition S has three priorities for the next five years. First, strengthen the foundations of the open access environment, second, support digital infrastructure by coordinating investment and third, explore financially sustainable systems. In practice, this means the organisation will review its ‘foundational principles’ to support a variety of open access models including the publish-review-curate model, diamond and preprints, Borrell-Damián says. It will also consider spending on scholarly communication and monitor which models work sustainably. ‘We are trying to shift the market towards more diverse, sustainable approaches,’ she adds.
Ginny Barbour, a medical scientist from Queensland University of Technology and co-chair of the Declaration on Research Assessment, believes Coalition S has made a difference. ‘It came at an important moment when the momentum for OA was slipping. Through its convening power and the way that it developed tools and policies I think it was able to change the narrative around the idea that OA was stalling. We now all accept that OA is a complicated issue and one that has to be fully integrated with other initiatives, including around open science, research assessment and research integrity. Crucially, we also need to accept that we need a diversity of models for OA.’
Lynn Kamerlin, a computational biophysicist at Georgia Tech, says the priorities recognise and try to address some of the problems created by previous strategies, especially equity issues, and welcomes a greater focus on finding solutions. ‘Cost is a major issue that no one has been able to solve. If Coalition S can come up with a viable solution that would be a huge help to the community.’ However, she is concerned that the strategy is moving towards funders taking more control of the publication process, either through providing the infrastructure or the funding for publication. ‘As a researcher that is a deeply worrying prospect,’ she notes. ‘In an age of increased politicisation of science, it is important that we have independent routes of dissemination of knowledge, with quality control through peer evaluation and based on scientific rigour. Funder control of the publication process would significantly jeopardise that.’
However, Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York and co-founder of the preprint server bioRxiv, says Plan S has gone from being something ‘fairly specific’ to something ‘rather vague’. ‘Originally, it was very focused on journals, in particular transformative agreements aimed at flipping subscription journals to OA.’ He notes that the strategy now focuses on preprints, alternative peer review models and diamond open access, adding that this change may be partly because Plan S has funnelled publishing towards APCs, a model that rewards high-volume commercial publishing. He says that many proponents of open access object to this development ‘as much as, if not more than, subscriptions’. ‘In that respect it has made a difference but perhaps not a difference everyone wanted.’
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