Ready or not

Open-access initiative Plan S launches in January, but how prepared are funders, publishers and researchers?

Since it was announced in July 2018 with great fanfare, the Plan S initiative has pushed the aim of finally making the outputs of all publicly funded research openly accessible immediately. It has triggered major policy changes at some of the world’s biggest research funders and academic publishers—and it hasn’t even formally begun yet.

Funders signed up to Plan S—including the European Commission, multiple European national funders, and the World Health Organization—will require the researchers they support to make their work available immediately through approved outlets from 2021.