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Plan S and Research Council of Norway

The goal of Plan S is that all research should be made openly available immediately. Plan S applies to new announcements from the Research Council from January 1st, 2021.

Project applications in 2021

If you get the project application approved after the Research Council's announcements after 01.01.21, the following applies to the project's published research results:

  • Articles must be made immediately available when published.
  • The authors are obliged to retain the necessary rights to their articles, so that there is always a free and open version of the article available.

3 paths to open access

There are 3 paths that meet the requirements for Plan S:

  1. Authors publish in pure Open Access journals or on Open Access platforms.
  2. Archiving the article in an open research repository if you have published in a closed journal. When archiving, use a peer-reviewed version of the article: either published version, if allowed, or accepted author version (postprint, AAM (Author's Accepted Manuscript)). Embargo is not allowed. No matter which version you archive, it must have a CC license (see more in the section on licenses).
  3. Publish open access in journals included in a transformative agreement.

Licenses

Your article must be made publicly available with a CC BY license, alternatively CC BY-SA or CC0. If you need to use another license, this must be justified by the project manager in the project's final report to the Research Council. It is the CC BY-ND license that can be used in that case. This license may be relevant when researchers need to limit others' opportunities to process a published text.

If you are self-archiving the accepted author version (postprint, AAM) of your article, it must also have a CC BY license.

Take a look at our webpage about the different CC-licenses.

Rights retention when submitting a manuscript

When your manuscript is submitted for review to a journal for the first time, the following text must be included:

"This research was funded, in whole or in part, by The Research Council of Norway [6 digit project number]. A CC BY or equivalent licence is applied to any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission, in accordance with the grant’s open access conditions."

In this way, the journal is made aware of the requirement that the author has in relation to research conducted. Contact the Research Council if the journal rejects this claim. cOAlition S has previously notified a number of publishers of the requirements associated with Plan S.

Journal Checker Tool

cOAlition S has developed an online tool, the Journal Checker Tool, where you check if journals meet the Plan S requirements. This is currently a beta version, and inaccuracies may occur. You fill in:

  • Journal title
  • Funder: Research Council of Norway or RCN
  • My institution: University of Oslo

Journal Checker Tool is also available from the site Norwegian register for scientific journals. This means that you can use the Norwegian register to find pure Open Access journals, journals that are included in transition agreements negotiated by Unit, and at the same time clarify whether the journal is an approved Plan S publishing channel. 

Books and chapters

Currently Plan S only applies to the publication of scientific articles. In the autumn of 2021, Coalition S also came up with recommendations for monographs and anthology chapters. These recommendations have not yet been implemented by the Research Council.

More information

Published Jan. 11, 2021 9:59 AM - Last modified Sep. 16, 2022 11:18 AM