According to science.org, Coalition S – the group of 28 scientific funders that shook up publishing with their 2018 Plan S mandate – just released a much softer five-year strategy for 2026-2030. Their original 2018 rule required grantees to publish research immediately free to read starting in 2021, which helped push open access publishing above 50% of new papers. But the new strategy, developed after consulting over 11,000 researchers, contains no new mandates limiting where grantees publish and acknowledges “no single model can meet all needs.” Unlike recent moves by funders like Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Gates Foundation, this plan favors alternatives to paywalled journals without trying to supplant them entirely, and decisions about funding alternative publishing venues won’t come before 2028.
From Shock to Softball
Here’s the thing about Plan S – it was genuinely disruptive when it launched. The coalition basically told scientists: if you want our money, you can’t publish behind paywalls anymore. That was a huge deal in an industry where journal reputation and impact factors dominate everything. But the backlash was intense. Critics said it limited academic freedom and, ironically, ended up fueling the very author-pays model they supposedly opposed. Now prestigious journals charge authors thousands per open-access article while keeping their paywalled content too. So the coalition basically blinked.
The Author-Pays Problem
The new strategy does support some interesting alternatives – particularly “diamond” open-access publishing that doesn’t charge authors at all. But they’re punting on the funding question until at least 2028. Meanwhile, the exploitative author-pays model keeps growing, and a handful of large companies are making bank from it. As information scientist Stefanie Haustein points out, funders are exactly the ones who could challenge this system. They have the power. They call the shots. So why aren’t they?
Reality Check
Look, the coalition’s own survey data tells the real story. Over 70% of researchers still prioritize journal reputation and impact factor when deciding where to publish. That’s the publishing equivalent of saying you want to eat healthy while ordering fast food every day. The incentives are completely misaligned. New scholar-led publishing venues sound great, but they need sustained funding and researcher buy-in to actually compete with established journals. There’s a real risk that alternatives like diamond open access get seen as magic bullets without the proper nurturing they need.
Where This Is Headed
So what does this softer approach actually mean for scientific publishing? Basically, we’re looking at incremental change rather than revolution. The coalition seems to have learned that you can’t mandate your way to reform in a system this entrenched. But the danger is that without clear requirements and funding commitments, the status quo will persist. The big commercial publishers aren’t going anywhere, and researchers will keep chasing impact factors because that’s what gets them jobs and grants. The new strategy reads like a compromise document – which probably means it won’t satisfy anyone completely. But maybe that’s the point when you’re trying to move 28 different organizations in the same direction.
