The initiative is a declaration of commitment to make “…full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality” by a target date of 1 January 2020.
Principles of the plan
The overriding principle of the Plan is that:
By 2020 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.
This includes the following:
- Authors retain copyright of their publication with no restrictions
- All publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY
- In all cases, the license applied should fulfil the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration
- Funders will ensure jointly the establishment of robust criteria and requirements for the services that compliant high-quality Open Access journals and Open Access platforms must provide
- Funders will provide [coordinated] incentives to establish and support high quality OA journals/platforms when appropriate
- Open Access publication fees should be covered by Funders or universities, not by individual researchers
- All scientists should be able to publish their work Open Access even if their institutions have limited means
- When Open Access publication fees are applied, their funding should be standardised and capped (across Europe)
- Funders will ask universities, research organisations, and libraries to align their policies and strategies, notably to ensure transparency
- These principles apply to all types of scholarly publications, but the timeline to achieve Open Access for monographs and books may be longer than 1 January 2020
- The importance of open archives and repositories for hosting research outputs is acknowledged because of their long-term archiving function and their potential for editorial innovation
- The ‘hybrid’ model of publishing is not compliant with the above principles
- Funders will monitor compliance and sanction non-compliance
You can find out more about cOAlition S here.