The radical part of cOAlition S's 'Towards Responsible Publishing' proposal is that it treats the article processing charge as the problem to be retired, not the problem to be regulated. The funder group behind Plan S published the proposal on 10 July 2023 and ran a consultation through 1 September 2023, asking one uncomfortable question: if public and philanthropic funders already pay for the research, why are they paying again, through subscriptions and APCs, to read and publish it back?
Three years later, that question still unsettles the people who sell scholarly publishing. The consultation produced no immediate policy mandate, but it drew a line between publishing services that earn their keep and publishing rents that survive on institutional habit. That distinction now appears in contract negotiations, preprint policies, and hiring-committee talk even where the phrase 'responsible publishing' never shows up.
What the Proposal Actually Says
cOAlition S describes a 'publish, review, curate' sequence. A researcher posts a preprint first, selects a peer review service after posting, and then places the reviewed version in a journal or platform that curates the record. Funders, universities, or national agencies would pay transparently for the services performed, rather than paying one APC at a price set by the publisher. The author would not be billed. The reader would not be billed. That is the quiet part.
The proposal asks institutions to stop buying articles as discrete products and start buying screening, review management, copyediting, and archiving as competing services. It also wants peer review reports published and linked to the version they evaluate. That second part gets less attention in summaries, but it is the part that would change how researchers read and trust the literature.
What the Consultation Asked
The official consultation page set out the proposal and a series of questions. It invited comments on the preprint-first route, the public release of review reports, transparent service pricing, and the mechanics of a transition away from author-facing charges.
Respondents were also asked who should govern the system and how to avoid replacing one gatekeeper with another. That governance question turned out to be the hardest part. Funders can set rules for the researchers they fund, but they cannot set a global market price for editorial labour, and they have no direct power over commercial publishers that do not take their money.
Archived materials remain useful reading for university administrators who are renegotiating read-and-publish contracts. The proposal is documented on the official cOAlition S page, alongside the Plan S principles that underpin it.
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Here's the Catch
Preprint-first sounds clean until editorial offices get involved. The catch is that the proposal makes publication more transparent but also more labour-intensive for reviewers and editors at a moment when departments say they cannot find time to read a single manuscript, let alone comment on it in public. The APC had the virtue of simplicity: one invoice, one PDF, done. Replacing it with a market for review and curation services only works if review is funded and formally recognised. It largely is not.
You can see the strain in the parallel fights over APC waiver activism and over preprint overlay journals, both of which already test the old revenue model. Published review reports become public scholarly records, so they need governance, metadata, contributor records, and moderation. That is not a reason to keep reviews secret. It is a reason to price the work properly instead of assuming it is free.
Hype Versus Reality
- Hype: The proposal will end the APC immediately. Reality: It has no enforcement mechanism. cOAlition S can signal, but it cannot legislate. Publishers still set prices.
- Hype: Preprints will replace peer review. Reality: The proposal keeps peer review; it moves the reports into the open and asks someone to pay for them.
- Hype: The consultation settled the debate. Reality: Feedback split along predictable lines. Funders and university library groups welcomed the direction; publishers dependent on subscription and APC revenue asked for more study before any transition.
- Hype: One global model fits every discipline. Reality: Humanities and social science researchers pointed out that monographs and long-form scholarship would require separate treatment from article workflows.
The gap between the hype and the working paper is widest on money. The proposal assumes someone will pay for public review infrastructure. Nobody has yet identified a stable, global budget line for it.
The Institutional Split
Wellcome and UK Research and Innovation have backed cOAlition S from the start, and their grants already carry open access conditions that push researchers toward preprint sharing and rights retention. University libraries mostly welcomed a debate that puts service costs on the table. Commercial publishers were more circumspect, arguing that unbundling editorial services would require new guarantees for quality control and versioning.
The split matters because libraries and publishers sit at opposite ends of the same invoice. A university that pays for a read-and-publish deal is not neutral; it has already spent the money that a service-based market would redirect. Read-and-publish contract disputes, including the UK's standoff with Elsevier, show how quickly this conversation becomes a budget negotiation rather than a philosophy seminar. Our earlier reporting on research assessment reform covers the same front from another angle.
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What Happens Next
cOAlition S has not made 'Towards Responsible Publishing' a binding policy. The proposal remains a discussion document, but it has already altered the language of funding calls. Some cOAlition S member funders now ask grantees to publish preprints and to include peer review reports in final reporting. Others are experimenting with direct funding for open infrastructure through initiatives that do not rely on APC invoices.
For researchers, the practical decision is not whether to adopt the whole model but which parts to adopt now. Posting a preprint costs nothing and satisfies a growing number of funder requirements. Publishing review reports publicly is harder, partly because journals do not always allow it and partly because a candid report can create professional risk.
The last word belongs to the people who have to post the preprint, answer the reviews, and then wait to see whether a committee counts any of it. They are still waiting for a model that treats their time as the finite budget item it is.