Publishing giant Elsevier has signed a national license deal with Couperin, France ’ s consortium of universities and research organizations, but critics say it doesn ’ t do enough to advance open access (OA) to scientific journal articles. Its terms are at odds with Plan S, a mandate to make publications immediately free to read starting in 2021, which France ’ s National Research Agency has backed.

The 4-year agreement includes a discount on subscription costs, bringing them down to 2009 levels by the end of 2022, Couperin announced last month . The French government says the agreement, which is retroactive to January, will save €1.5 million this year. The deal does not provide that all articles be published OA immediately; instead, it includes a 25% rebate on charges that researchers pay if they elect to publish individual articles OA. “ For the first time, there is a decrease of expenditure, and it is a significant one,” says a spokesperson for France ’ s research ministry.

But critics take issue with how the agreement handles papers for which researchers don ’ t pay the OA fee. The agreement says these papers would become free to read, hosted on Elsevier’s servers 1 year after publishing. This is longer than the 6-month delay defined in a 2016 French law. The French government says the deal does not break the law, which gives authors the right to make their papers freely available in an online archive after 6 months but does not force publishers to do so.

However, any delay is incompatible with the future zero-wait rules of France ’ s National Research Agency under Plan S. The agency did not respond to Science ’ s request for comment, and the group of funders behind Plan S declined to comment on the French deal. But Robert-Jan Smits, one of the plan ’ s original architects, who is now president of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, says it is a “real pity” that the agreement does not comply with Plan S.

Other critics say the deal is a missed opportunity to speed up the transition to OA. France ’ s math society said the deal has problems—among them, that it encourages “ hybrid” journals, which charge both readers to access articles and authors to publish OA papers; Plan S is cracking down on such publishing models. The French Society of Physics also points out that other countries have taken a harder line in negotiations with publishers. Instead of mere discounts, institutions in Germany and Norway have signed or are seeking so-called “ transformative agreements” that eliminate hybrid spending and use former subscription fees to cover both reading and OA publishing; the University of California system is doing the same.

“ I view [the French deal] as a positive baby step towards a wider transition,” says Colleen Campbell, director of the Open Access 2020 initiative at the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich, Germany, which promotes this “ transformative” approach.

The French government says two-thirds of the Elsevier savings will go to a “ national open science fund ” that will soon make €2.6 million available for OA publishing projects. According to France ’ s Open Science Barometer , Elsevier journals published about 30% of the country ’ s science papers in 2017, more than any other publisher. Of those articles, about 20% were freely available, whereas the country ’ s overall average was about 40% OA.