Today we announced our support for Plan S’s transformative journals programme as a welcome new route for our authors to publish Open Access (OA) research articles. All being well with our application, we will have two routes to Plan S compliance: transformative agreements (our Read and Publish deals) and transformative journals. These two routes will work well together to allow us to publish research funded by cOAlition S as Gold OA.

Plan S also offers a third route to compliance that we cannot support, which is making authors’ accepted manuscripts open access without an embargo period under a CC-BY license (embargo-free Green OA). This route is implemented through cOAlition S’s Rights Retention Strategy. We appreciate that cOAlition S needs to offer a Green route for publishers to adopt if they choose. But there are two major difficulties we have with Green OA as implemented in Plan S.

The first difficulty is that it does not foster a move to sustainable, high quality, OA publishing. Embargo-free Green OA is financially self-defeating, imperilling the very subscriptions on which it depends. There are now commercial services to help institutions determine which journal subscriptions they can cancel due to the availability of Green OA content. More importantly, embargo-free Green OA undermines an engagement with new approaches, such as Read and Publish, that repurpose subscriptions to put OA publishing on a sustainable footing. Library budgets, already stretched before the global pandemic, are now under such extreme pressure that a greater availability of embargo-free Green OA content will increasingly put high-quality journal publishing at risk.

Our second major difficulty with Green OA as implemented in Plan S is that the Rights Retention Strategy will put authors, and their institutions, in a confusing and difficult position. Knowingly or unknowingly, an author might sign a journal’s publishing agreement that conflicts with an agreement they have with their funder. The legal situation is complex and unclear, and might vary by jurisdiction. More significantly, the author and their institution will become caught between the policies of the funder and the publisher. This is all the exact opposite of what cOAlition S is aiming to achieve.

We understand the challenges that authors and institutions face in navigating the complexities of different publishers’ OA policies. We don’t disagree with the principle of rights retention per se. On the contrary, authors should retain rights to make their accepted manuscripts Green OA after an embargo period. We have been enshrining this both in our publishing agreements with authors and through the Institutional Archiving Agreement that we helped to develop. Green OA in some form or other will continue to be necessary for a little longer while we find ways for all research to be published as Gold open access.

We and cOAlition S want the same thing: a global transition to full and immediately Open Access publishing. We applaud cOAlition S’s commitment to funding Gold Open Access. Of the three routes to compliance that they offer us, the transformative journals and transformative agreement routes give us a solid foundation for achieving our shared goals.