Neil Jacobs, head of open science and research lifecycle at Jisc, has been appointed as interim programme manager for the international consortium of research funders, cOAlition S.

Jacobs will take forward the work of the consortium, Plan S, to help accelerate the transition to full and immediate open access (OA). Plan S requires that scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant open-access journals or platforms.

Commenting on his new role, Jacobs said: 'Jisc has enthusiastically agreed to a request from cOAlition S that it provide programme support for the remainder of 2019 in the first instance.

'Jisc has an international reputation for supporting Open Access in a wide variety of ways for many years and is very aware of the challenges in a cost-effective and timely transition to open access. Jisc has publicly welcomed Plan S and continues to work hard to enable the research sector implement the principles.'

Jacobs has been actively supporting open access for more than 15 years – the majority of that time at Jisc, which supports UK universities and research centres in the use of digital technologies.

He has championed the UK programmes that led to the widespread take-up of repositories in the UK, and fostered the development of services such as Sherpa RoMEO, which gives a summary of publishers' open access archiving conditions for individual journals as well as OpenDOAR, the world’s authoritative and quality-assured directory of open access repositories.

Jacobs also actively advises Jisc in its negotiations with publishers on transformative deals such as the recent agreement with Springer Nature. Neil represents the UK rectors group on the European University Association open science expert group and is a member of the board of the Directory of OA Books.

He will spend three days a week in the cOAlition S role, starting this month and working through to the end of the calendar year.