Plan S compliance

cOAlition S emphasises the need for high-quality journals, therefore requiring journals/platforms to have a solid system in place for review according to the standards within the relevant discipline and guided by the core practices and policies outlined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

• Journals published on the platform meet eligibility criteria, which are evaluated by disciplinary scientific committees and the Steering Committee. They respect open standards and best practices in scientific publishing. Episciences promotes the diamond model of publication at no cost to the reader (no subscription fees) or to the author (no publication fees – APC).
• Episciences is member of COPE.

 

The journal/platform must provide, on its website, a detailed description of its editorial policies and decision-making processes. In addition, at least basic statistics must be published annually, covering in particular the number of submissions, the number of reviews requested, the number of reviews received, the approval rate, and the average time between submission and publication.

• The eligibility criteria for journals are available on the website.
• The platform provides the journals with a feature that allows them to display statistical indicators on their website.

 

The journal/platform must accept the retention of copyright by the authors or their institutions, at no extra cost. Licenses to publish must preserve the right and responsibility of the author/institution to make the VoR or the AAM of the article Open Access immediately upon publication, under an open license.

• One of the eligibility criteria for journals is that articles are distributed under a Creative Commons licence. Episciences recommends the CC-BY licence.
• The journal retains ownership of the titles it publishes.
• Authors retain full rights to their articles.

 

The journal/platform must either enable authors to publish with immediate and permanent Open Access (without any kind of technical or other form of obstacles) under an open license.

• Published articles are immediately open access under a Creative Commons licence.

 

Use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for scholarly publications (with versioning, for example, in case of revisions), such as DOI (preferable), URN, or Handle.

• Episciences assigns DOIs to articles published on the platform.

 

Deposition of content with a long-term digital preservation or archiving programme (such as CLOCKSS, Portico, or equivalent).

• Episciences does not host published content that has been deposited in an open archive or preprint server. The platform works with infrastructures that have a long-term preservation policy for content: HAL, arXiv.
• The CCSD has included in its 2024 Action Plan a study on the long-term preservation of articles hosted in archives that do not guarantee the sustainability of publications.

 

High-quality article level metadata in standard interoperable non-proprietary format, under a CC0 public domain dedication. Metadata must include complete and reliable information on funding provided by cOAlition S funders (including as a minimum the name of the funder and the grant number/identifier).

• Metadata is distributer under a CC0 licence. Metadata is obtained from open archives and preprint servers, and is automatically enriched with identifiers and data provided by other EOSC services.
• Metadata is exposed and accessible through a variety of formats and APIs. They can be retrieved via the OAI-PMH repository, but also from each article page, which offers exports in BibTeX, TEI, Dublin Core,OpenAIRE, Crossref, DOAJ, ZbMath Open, JSON.
• The funder and project ID are provided by OpenAIRE Graph.

 

Machine-readable information on the Open Access status and the license embedded in the article, in standard non-proprietary format.

• The licence can be found in the TEI.

 

Support for PIDs for authors (e.g., ORCID), funders, funding programmes and grants, institutions, and other relevant entities.

• Episciences supports the following PIDs : ORCID for authors, ROR for the affiliations, and the funder PID (via OpenAIRE Graph)

 

Registering the self-archiving policy of the venue in SHERPA/RoMEO (now Open policy Finder)

• Episciences manages the referencing in Open policy Finder.

 

Availability for download of full text for all publications (including supplementary text and data) in a machine-readable community standard format such as JATS XML.

• Episciences does not host published content that has been deposited in an open archive or preprint server.

 

Direct deposition of publications (in a machine-readable community standard format such as JATS XML, and including complete metadata as described above) by the publisher into author designated or centralised Open Access repositories that fulfil the Plan S criteria.

• Papers are hosted by open archives and preprint servers. This criterion does not apply to the overlay model used by Episciences.

 

OpenAIRE compliance of the metadata.

• Episciences is part of the service portfolio of OpenAIRE : metadata is OpenAIRE compliant.

 

Linking to data, code, and other research outputs that underlie the publication and are available in external repositories.

• It is possible to link published articles with research data hosted in a Dataverse repository (DOI), and with software archived in Software Heritage (SWHID)

 

Openly accessible data on citations according to the standards by the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC).

• Episciences is interoperable with OpenCitations.