Rationale for the Revisions Made to the Plan S Principles and Implementation Guidance | Plan S

"The revised Plan S maintains the fundamental principles

• No scholarly publication should be locked behind a paywall;
• Open Access should be immediate i.e., without embargoes;
• Full Open Access is implemented by the default use of a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY licence as per the Berlin Declaration;
• Funders commit to support Open Access publication fees at a reasonable level;
• Funders will not support publication in hybrid (or mirror/sister) journals unless they are part of a transformative arrangement with a clearly defined endpoint.

But a number of important changes are proposed in the implementation guidance

• In order to provide more time for researchers and publishers to adapt to the changes under Plan S, the timeline has been extended by one year to 2021;
• Transformative agreements will be supported until 2024;
• More options for transitional arrangements (transformative agreements, transformative model agreements, ‘transformative journals’) are supported;
• Greater clarity is provided about the various compliance routes: Plan S is NOT just about a publication fee model of Open Access publishing. cOAlition S supports a diversity of sustainability models for Open Access journals and platforms;
• More emphasis is put on changing the research reward and incentive system: cOAlition S funders explicitly commit to adapt the criteria by which they value researchers and scholarly output;
• The importance of transparency in Open Access publication fees is emphasised in order to inform the market and funders’ potential standardisation and capping of payments of such fees;
• The technical requirements for Open Access repositories have been revised...."