YERUN welcomes the launch of Plan S, by cOALition S, a group of 13 national research funders and the European Commission (ERC)for the realisation of full and immediate OA. YERUN members discussed the principles during their General Assembly held at Brunel University London, 5 September 2018, and decided to give it its support while presenting some considerations.

Despite having many advocates in the last 15 years among policy makers, researchers, funders, research performing organisations and libraries, progress towards a sustainable and global OA framework has been slow to materialise, and has been hampered by fragmentation and other challenges.

Plan S gathers 10 principles with the main objective that by 2020 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant OA Journals or on compliant OA Platforms.

YERUN fully supports Plan S and acknowledges the big step taken with the release of Plan S towards truly Open Science. However, it is limited to OA. Incentives, infrastructures and solutions for a new evaluation system should be developed alongside Plan S to promote Open Research Data and publication of other research outputs along with other Open Science practices.

Photo credit: Science Europe, cOAlition S (https://www.scienceeurope.org/coalition-s/)