Recognizing their duty as research funders and in order to support efforts towards open access publication of research results, an informal group of Research Funding Organizations, later joined by large philanthropies, called cOAlition S set up Plan S which in its current form states that “With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.” The SOAR project will aim to support Plan S implementation by 1. Helping grantees researchers identify Plan S compliant publishing venues offering a route to compliance with Plan S and Horizon Europe requirements on open access, via the development of an online Journal Checker Tool ; 2. Supporting European and international activities to foster policy alignment with Plan S by more funders, and to grow cOAlition S and 3. Fostering communication and increased engagement with research communities. The project will be led by the European Science Foundation, in close collaboration with the Open Access Champion appointed by cOAlition S. The desired impact of the project will be increased support for Plan S and Open Access, contributing to Horizon Europe priorities on Open Access.

The European Commission has made great strides in pushing for a more open scholarly publishing system in the past 15 years, and Open Access to publications is now mainstreamed into the European Commission research funding framework. The EC has been supporting a consortium of research funders called cOAlition S that have adopted an Open Access mandate for recipients of their funding called Plan S, which required cOAlition S grantees to publish all peer-reviewed articles resulting from their grant funds in open access (OA). In the five years since Plan S was published, cOAlition S has grown from 12 founding members to 28 and the Plan S Principles have been implemented in the participating funders’ policies. We are now in a position to evaluate the first five years of Plan S and cOAlition S, and reflect on lessons learned and the road ahead. The OA-Advance project will contribute to strengthening cOAlition S as an instrument to advance the European Commission’s and participating funders’ shared vision to deliver full and immediate OA. It will work to achieve this by assessing the impact of Plan S through an independent review, and by providing recommendations on how to build on the achievements of Plan S to support a new vision for the future of scholarly publishing.

Experimental and theoretical research on intrinsic Josephson junctions (IJJ's) has proved to be one of the most scientifically and technological fruitful areas of condensed matter research over the last decade. Whilst many other fields of research in high-temperature superconductivity have come and gone since their discovery almost twenty years ago, intrinsic Josephson phenomena remain widely studied throughout the world due to the wide variety of quantum and classical physics which can be studied in IJJ's. In fact in the last year there has been a resurgence of interest in this area due to controversies over both the role of heating in IJJ's and the vortex phase transition from a triangular lattice to a rectangular lattice. These controversies, coupled with the very recent observation of macroscopic quantum tunnelling in IJJ's, suggest that a conference at which the latest developments in IJJ research will be discussed, will be a timely and significant contribution to the further development of new science and applications. The intrinsic Josephson effect was first observed by Kleiner et al. in 1992 and published in two papers which have now been cited nearly 1100 times. The effect is observed in anisotropic cuprate superconductors when a transport current is passed in the c-direction / i.e. perpendicular to the cuprate double-planes. Since the coherence length in the c-direction is less than the plane separation, the planes are Josephson coupled. Hence a single crystal sample of such a superconductor acts as a series array of Josephson junctions. The number of junctions is simply given by the dimension of the crystal in the c-direction divided by the spacing of the cuprate double-planes (of order 1.5 nm). The term intrinsic here distinguishes IJJ's from junctions in which there is an artificially engineered barrier between two superconducting films. Such engineered junctions have proven difficult to fabricate using high-temperature superconductors due to the very short coherence length / in fact the same short coherence length which makes IJJ's a possibility.The discovery has stimulated a wealth of research in Europe, the Far East and (to a lesser extent) the USA which led to the creation of the biennial conference series known as Plasma , the full title being The [nth] International Symposium on the Intrinsic Josephson Effect and Plasma Oscillations in High Tc Superconductors. The first four meetings in the series were held in Sendai, Japan (twice), Pommersfelden (Germany) and Tsukuba (Japan). The fifth meeting will be hosted by University College London and held at the IEE in July 2006.