Plan S & Funder Compliance

Overview

A funded author writes to say their grant requires a CC BY license, immediate open access and deposit in a specific repository, and asks whether your journal can do that. Your license page says “all rights reserved” because that is what the template said in 2014. If the answer stays no, funded authors go elsewhere, and their funders’ compliance checkers mark your journal as non-compliant.

Plan S & Funder Compliance brings the journal’s licensing, deposit, metadata and policy statements into line with what funders actually check. We identify which mandates matter to your authors (cOAlition S, national open-access policies, major public and charitable funders), configure the journal to meet them, and document it in a compliance statement that authors and funders can rely on.

It is for open-access journals with funded authors, journals moving from subscription to open access, and institutional publishers whose authors are subject to national mandates.

What’s Included

• Mandate mapping — the funders and policies relevant to your author base, and what each requires on license, embargo, deposit, rights retention and metadata.
• Licensing configuration — license options set on the platform, license text in the author agreement and on each article, and machine-readable license metadata in the article records.
• Rights retention alignment — author agreement wording that accommodates funder rights-retention strategies without conflict.
• Deposit and archiving setup — repository deposit routes, long-term preservation registration (for example, PKP PN, CLOCKSS or Portico), and self-archiving policy registered in the relevant directories.
• Metadata configuration — funder and grant identifiers, license URLs, ORCID iDs and open-access status in Crossref deposits and the journal’s article records.
• Compliance statement — a public page and a one-page document for authors stating what the journal provides, with a checklist for each major mandate.
• Annual re-check — funder policies change; we re-test the configuration once a year and update the statement.

How It Works

1. We review the journal’s current licenses, agreements, metadata and deposit practice.
2. We map the relevant mandates and agree the target configuration with the journal’s owner.
3. We configure the platform, metadata and deposit routes, and update the policy text.
4. We test with a sample of articles against the funders’ published checkers and deliver the compliance statement.
5. Twelve months later, we re-check and update.

Priced per journal, with the annual re-check as a small recurring fee.

What Stays With Your Editors

Compliance changes how articles are licensed and distributed, not which articles are accepted. Your editors keep full authority over reviewer selection, editorial assessment and acceptance. The choice of default license and any policy that affects authors’ rights is made by the journal’s owner; we advise, configure and run the infrastructure.

Important Limitations

• Compliance is determined by each funder against its own policy, and funders change their policies. Our statement reflects the configuration we tested at the time; the annual re-check exists because it will need updating.
• Inclusion in DOAJ or any other database is decided solely by each database. NeucitePress prepares, remediates and submits but cannot sell inclusion.
• We do not provide legal advice. Where the author agreement or license choice has legal consequences for your institution, we recommend review by your counsel and will supply the documents in a form that makes that review quick.
• Meeting funder requirements does not by itself bring citations, submissions or ranking.

Common Questions

Do we have to use CC BY?
For most funder mandates, CC BY (or in limited cases CC BY-ND) is what is required for compliance. The choice remains yours; we set out what each option means for your funded authors.

We are a subscription journal. Can we be compliant?
Partly, through rights retention and self-archiving routes that some funders accept, but full compliance generally requires an open-access route for funded articles. We will tell you what is achievable under your model.

Is this the same as being in DOAJ?
No, but the two overlap heavily on licensing and metadata. If you want both, we scope them together.

Request a proposal, or begin with the Journal Health Check.