Key Takeaway: elimination of embargoes and the use of open licensing to make research freely available upon publication
Plan S is an initiative devised by Science Europe to ensure delivery of full and immediate Open Access (OA) for funded research publications. The implementation framework is supported by a group of international research funders called cOALition S and came into force on 1 January 2021.
Plan S Principles and Implementation
Plan S applies to all peer-reviewed publications that are based on results from research funded fully or partially by cOAlition S members. In addition, the right to reuse the article is subject to an open licence (usually the Creative Commons Attribution licence) that grants the reader the right to reuse all or parts of it without having to seek additional permission, subject to appropriate attribution of the original source.
A list of organisations endorsing Plan S and working on implementation include UKRI, the European Commission, Wellcome, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, World Health Organisation and more.
Routes to Plan S compliance:
Authors are strongly encouraged to retain specific rights to self-archive published works. As the creator of a work, copyright is normally your own property unless you transfer it to another party or it is owned by your employer. The SHERPA/RoMEO database provides clear summaries of standard copyright agreements for publishers and links to detailed policies on publisher websites.
'Open licence' means a licence that permits anyone to freely access, use, modify, and share the licensed material for any purpose. This may include licences conformant with the Open Definition that are commonly used for scholarly works and datasets, such as the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY); Open Government Licence (OGL) for public sector information; and Open Source licences typically used for software source code, such as the Apache License 2.0 or the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Creative Commons, has a number of model licences which authors can apply ‘as given’ or adapted to their requirements. The licences contain these elements:
These licences are commonly found on Open Access research outputs, and can help you share your work while protecting its integrity. The licenses have a layer of Legal Code, a 'human readable' Commons Deed and a 'machine readable' element for software to understand. The symbol that generally appears at the bottom of a research output will look something like this: