This post is by Library Research Support Advisor, Kirstine McDermid

Plan S funded researchers can publish in any journal, including subscription journals. Plan S funders will change their grant requirements so that a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license is applied to accepted manuscripts by default.  Researchers must inform their publisher that the submission is already licensed under CC-BY and make their accepted manuscript available in a compliant repository at the point of publication.

White Rose Research Online is a Plan S compliant repository.

Funders will change their grant conditions from 2021 onwards, overriding any journal policy. However, it is hoped that publishers will align their agreements to allow zero embargoes for author accepted manuscripts. Publishers including Sage and Emerald have already adopted zero embargo journal policies.

Plan S seeks to transfer sufficient intellectual ownership rights to the author instead of the publisher, to ensure that authors can publish where they want to while still satisfying the requirement for full and immediate open access.

Plan S funded researchers can also publish in journals that have signed up to a transformative agreement whereby costs for both subscriptions and publishing are paid upfront so that researchers can publish without an article processing charge. Or they can publish in a transformative journal, a hybrid journal which has committed to becoming fully open access for an article processing charge.