A new mandate highlights costs, benefits of making all scientific articles free to read

Scientists have several ways to comply with Plan S, including by paying publishers a fee to make an article freely available on a journal website, or depositing the article in a free public repository where anyone can download it. The mandate is the first by an international coalition of funders, which now includes 17 agencies and six foundations, including the Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, two of the world’s largest funders of biomedical research.

The group, which calls itself Coalition S, has fallen short of its initial aspiration to catalyze a truly international movement, however. Officials in three top producers of scientific papers—China, India, and the United States—have expressed general support for open access, but have not signed on to Plan S. Its mandate for immediate open access will apply to only about 6% of authors of the world’s papers in 2017, according to an estimate by the Clarivate analytics firm.

Still, there’s reason to think Coalition S will make an outsize impact. In 2017, 35% of papers published in Nature and 31% of those in Science cited at least one coalition member as a funding source. “The people who get [Coalition S] funding are very prominent scientists,” Rooryck says. “We punch above our weight.” The Nature and Cell Press families of journals announced in recent weeks that they would allow authors to publish papers outside their paywall, for hefty fees.