Plan S is an international initiative launched by cOAlition S, a group of research funders primarily from Europe. Think of it as a movement saying, “If we, the funders, pay for the research, the final published work should be free for everyone to read and reuse immediately.”
What Plan S Generally Requires
Immediate Open Access (OA): No more waiting periods (embargoes). The article must be made open access immediately.
Creative Commons License (CC BY): Your work requires a specific, permissive license (usually CC BY) so that others can freely reuse it, provided they credit you.
No “Hybrid” Journals (mostly): It generally bans publishing in journals that are subscription-based but also offer an OA option (hybrid journals), unless the journal is part of a “transformative agreement” to become fully open access.
Plan S and Your AB Journals Submission
Good News: AB Journals strongly support the Open Access Initiative and all journals are peer-reviewed open-access journal and freely accessible to everyone everywhere.
Compliance Check: Since AB Journals is a fully open-access journal, it already meets the spirit of Plan S’s core requirement, making content immediately free to read. Authors retain all copyright and articles are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
Funder & Institutional Mandates: Following the Money Trail
Mandates are simply rules set by the groups that pay for the research or employ the researchers (the funders and institutions).
What They Are
Funder Mandates: These come from the organizations that gave you the grant (e.g., the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Wellcome Trust, or an African national research fund). They tell you how the research they paid for must be published. These often require the final manuscript to be deposited in a public repository.
Institutional Mandates: These come from your university or research center. They might require all staff and students to deposit a copy of their accepted manuscripts into the university’s own repository, often to boost the institution’s visibility and research profile.
Mandates and Your AB Journals Submission
Check Your Funder/Institution: Your first step is always to check the exact policy of the organization that funded your specific research.
AB Journals Support: AB Journals’ open access model generally helps you comply because it already publishes the final work openly. We also state our commitment to archiving published works in databases, which aligns with the spirit of mandate compliance.
Action for You (The Submitting Author): If your grant is from an institution with a mandate, you may be required to choose a specific license (like CC BY) or deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) into your institutional or funder’s repository immediately upon acceptance.
