cOAlition S | Gdańsk University of Technology

1. Authors or their institutions retain copyright to their publications. All publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY), in order to fulfil the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration.
2. The Funders will develop robust criteria and requirements for the services that high-quality Open Access journals, Open Access platforms, and Open Access repositories must provide.
3. In cases where high-quality Open Access journals or platforms do not yet exist, the Funders will, in a coordinated way, provide incentives to establish and support them when appropriate; support will also be provided for Open Access infrastructures where necessary.
4. Where applicable, Open Access publication fees are covered by the Funders or research institutions, not by individual researchers; it is acknowledged that all researchers should be able to publish their work Open Access.
5. The Funders support the diversity of business models for Open Access journals and platforms. When Open Access publication fees are applied, they must be commensurate with the publication services delivered and the structure of such fees must be transparent to inform the market and funders potential standardisation and capping of payments of fees.
6. The Funders encourage governments, universities, research organisations, libraries, academies, and learned societies to align their strategies, policies, and practices, notably to ensure transparency.
7. The above principles shall apply to all types of scholarly publications, but it is understood that the timeline to achieve Open Access for monographs and book chapters will be longer and requires a separate and due process.
8. The Funders do not support the ‘hybrid’ model of publishing. However, as a transitional pathway towards full Open Access within a clearly defined timeframe, and only as part of transformative arrangements, Funders may contribute to financially supporting such arrangements.
9. The Funders will monitor compliance and sanction non-compliant beneficiaries/grantees.
10. The Funders commit that when assessing research outputs during funding decisions they will value the intrinsic merit of the work and not consider the publication channel, its impact factor (or other journal metrics), or the publisher.

More information

The publications are to be available in journals and on platforms compliant with guidelines that ensure that content can be read and downloaded without any obstruction. Editorial offices and publishers should have established procedures for the review and quality control of the journal, i.e. the management system, intellectual property and authorship, reviewing, complaints and appeals for alleged irregularities, conflicts of interest, etc. Information must be openly available on the journal's website or platforms. These procedures should be in line with the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines. COPE described the procedures that determine the best publishing practices aimed at ensuring the highest standards of scientific work.

Funding institutions are to require that each article in the journal be awarded a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), i.e. an electronic document identification number. DOI is designed to ensure permanent access to documents as opposed to changing URLs. In order for the publication to be compliant with the Plan S guidelines, the journal in which the research results are published should also be registered in the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) - a directory of open scientific journals implementing proven publishing practices.
Journal Checker Tool

The Plan S guidelines recommend the use of identifiers also for authors, the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is mentioned as an example of an author identifier.

Plan S provides for the immediate availability of scientific publications under free licenses allowing the content to be reused for any purpose, including commercial purposes. The Creative Commons license is recommended, and CC BY 4.0 (attribution) is a required license for research articles.

The following exceptions may apply:

• secondly, cOAlition S will accept the use of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license and declarations of transfer to the CC0 public domain
• in the case of individual articles, the members of cOAliton S may agree to use the CC BY-ND license, provided that the grantee explicitly requests it and justifies such request
• content that is part of a publication to which third parties have rights (such as images or graphics) are not covered by these requirements

Plan S is primarily about publications, but signatories encourage openly sharing of research data as well, subject to ethical and legal constraints.

Content is required to be deposited in an appropriate system for long-term archiving by publishers. The guidelines also allow for the possibility of self-archiving of articles by authors. Authors choosing the green open access will have to take into account the content of two bases for the process to be in line with Plan S guidelines:

• Sherpa/RoMEO - stores information about contract templates that the authors conclude with the publisher when submitting their work for printing. These agreements define the limitations and possibilities for self-archiving in repositories. The journal must be registered with Sherpa / Romeo.
• OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) - is a database registering open institutional and scientific repositories. The repository where the author intends to deposit the work should be registered with OpenDOAR.

Articles should be deposited and made available immediately under a CC BY license in the version after review (Author's Accepted Manuscript or Version of Record).

The guidelines regulate the issue of financing open access publications, the so-called Price Transparency Framework (developed by Informative Power) and Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA). As of 1 July 2022, only publishers that adhere to at least one of the two cOAlition S-approved plans will be eligible for funding.

Plan S signatories have announced cooperation with the ESAC (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges) initiative, established in 2014, which aims to collect, develop and share data on the open access publishing market, with particular emphasis on the role played by large publishers in it. cOAlition S will thus contribute to fair and reasonable pricing for publishing services, including a fair exemption policy that reflects publication costs.

The requirement for price transparency will apply to all articles financed under the transformational mechanisms, as well as fees charged by open journals and platforms.

cOAlition S is currently working on creating a website that provides access to publisher services and publication pricing data. The website will provide:

• secure means by which academic journal publishers who publish research papers funded by cOAlition S can submit price and service data, in line with approved price transparency principles
• a secure way by which approved users (scientists, researchers, funders, institutions, librarians and library consortia) can access this data and download or compare prices and services offered by different journals and publishers

In order to ensure the highest quality of the service, surveys of the opinions of potential suppliers and beneficiaries are carried out. A detailed description of the planned service can be found in the Request for Information (RFI) file.
COAlition S Report on Publication Costs

cOAlition S is opposed to the use of bibliometric indicators to evaluate individual scientific articles and researchers' achievements, as well as to make decisions about hiring, promotion or research funding decisions. The guidelines for implementing Plan S include support for the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). In December 2022 cOAlition S became a member of Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and signed the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment.