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Draft Plan S and open Access: Home

“With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.”

cOAlition S

What is Plan S?

Plan S is an initiative for open access publishing that was launched in September 2018. An international consortium of research funders, known as cOAlition S, support Plan S and is committed to fulfilling its ten principles. Several funders have aligned with Plan S including United Kingdom Research & Innovation (UKRI), Wellcome Trust and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  

How does Plan S affect researchers at University of Bath?

University of Bath researchers who are funded by a Plan S aligned funder are required to make their work immediately open under a CC-BY licence. There are three routes to compliance:

  1. Publish in a fully open access journal (indexed in DOAJ) or transformative journal under a CC-BY licence.
  2. Publish in a journal that offers a gold open occess option via a transformative agreement under a CC-BY.
  3. Publish in a hybrid journal not included in routes 1 or 2 and deposit the author accepted manuscript in Pure under a CC-BY licence (This route may require a rights retention statement).

Support.

The Library provides support to researchers in four key ways

  1. Supporting compliance via our Journal Checker Form. This form should be used to check your chosen journal will be compliant with your funder requirements.
  2. Managing the three open access funds, Bath Open Access Fund (BOAF), UKRI block grant and the Research Strategy Open Access Fund (RSOAF).
  3. Negotiating and managing publishing agreements that offer a compliant route.
  4. Managing the University's Institutional Repository, Pure.

Queries should be emailed to openaccess@bath.ac.uk

Rights Retention Strategy.

The Plan S Rights Retention Strategy applies to research articles funded by a cOAlition S Organisation. 

The strategy's purpose is to:

  • ensure cOAlition S-funded research is open access without embargo with a CC-BY licence and accessible via a repository.
  • ensure funded researchers have the opportunity to seek publication in as wide a variety of journals as possible, including hybrid journals outside a transformative agreement.
  • enable funded researchers to retain rights to re-use their own work.

The following rights retention statement should be used in the submission letter and acknowledgements section for articles published in journals not compliant with routes 1 or 2,

"This research was funded in whole or in part by the [Organisation name [Grant number]. A CC-BY or equivalent licence is applied to [AAM/the VoR] arising from this submission, in accordance with the grant's open access conditions"

Stating your licensing terms: why it is important for authors.

Viedo: How to reuse & share your knowledge as you wish through rights retention.

FAQs