BUILDING ON THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF PLAN S TO FURTHER ADVANCE OPEN ACCESS AND SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

Project Information

OA-Advance

Grant agreement ID: 101157697

DOI

10.3030/101157697

Project closed

EC signature date 22 December 2023

Start date 20 September 2023

End date 19 December 2025

Funded under

• Reforming and enhancing the European R&I System

Total cost

€ 132 000,00

EU contribution

€ 132 000,00

Coordinated by

FONDATION EUROPEENNE DE LA SCIENCE
France

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - OA-Advance (BUILDING ON THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF PLAN S TO FURTHER ADVANCE OPEN ACCESS AND SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION)

Reporting period: 2024-09-20 to 2025-12-19

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The European Commission has made great strides in pushing for a more open scholarly publishing system in the past 15 years, and Open Access to publications is now mainstreamed into the European Commission research funding framework. The EC has been supporting a consortium of research funders called cOAlition S that have adopted an Open Access mandate for recipients of their funding called Plan S, which required cOAlition S grantees to publish all peer-reviewed articles resulting from their grant funds in open access (OA). In the five years since Plan S was published, cOAlition S has grown from 12 founding members to 28 and the Plan S Principles have been implemented in the participating funders’ policies. We are now in a position to evaluate the first five years of Plan S and cOAlition S, and reflect on lessons learned and the road ahead.

The OA-Advance project will contribute to strengthening cOAlition S as an instrument to advance the European Commission’s and participating funders’ shared vision to deliver full and immediate OA. It will work to achieve this by assessing the impact of Plan S through an independent review, and by providing recommendations on how to build on the achievements of Plan S to support a new vision for the future of scholarly publishing.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The Reporting Period 1 covers 19 September 2023-18 September 2024, which was mainly dedicated to Work Package 1: Monitoring of the Impact of Plan S, and some early communications activities under Work Package 2.The main deliverable D.1.1 of this WP, the final report entitled "Galvanising the Open Access Community", was published on 15 October 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13738479

The main findings of the report:
• Plan S has opened new avenues for achieving full and immediate Open Access, successfully placing Open Access high on policymakers’ agendas and bringing publishers to the negotiating table with institutions.
• The Plan S rights retention strategy had potentially game-changing effects, and institutions have since adopted into their own Rights Retention Policies.
• cOAlition S has a significant role in the current momentum around Diamond Open Access, and in raising awareness of the inequities of article-based charges publishing models.
• It is too early to fully assess Plan S’s quantitative impact, as many policies only took effect in 2021 or later, and they recommend revisiting the study in 5-10 years.
• Observing the significant progress in the push towards full and immediate Open Access since Plan S was first announced and the influential role of the alliance of research funders, it is recommended to continue cOAlition S beyond 2025.
• There is more work to do to reach the research community and include more funders from the Global South.

The second part of the grant supported the work leading to the development of the new cOAlition S strategy 2026-2030.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

n/a