Under a new publishing model, a critical mass of library subscriptions could keep science freely accessible.Credit: Getty
More than 70 journals are trialling a publishing model called subscribe to open (S2O), in which libraries pay an annual subscription fee to make paywalled journals open access.
The trial, set to start next January, will run for three years if there is enough participation. It aims to make academic journals freely available online without charging authors or relying on donations. Fifty-four societies, museums and research institutions around the world have signed their journals up.
The model guarantees that a journal’s content will be free to access for one year, as long as enough libraries commit to paying an annual subscription fee. If there aren’t enough subscriptions to the journal, all of its content remains paywalled. This process repeats annually, which means that ongoing access depends on yearly participation by libraries. It’s not permanent open access, says Lauren Kane, chief executive of BioOne, the non-profit organization in Washington DC that is leading the pilot. “It is a conditional open access.”
Kane says this ‘all or nothing’ approach ensures that there is enough money to cover the publishing costs. The hope is that the system will allow smaller journals with limited funding to be open access.
2024 Research Leaders
The S2O trial includes journals under the BioOne umbrella, independent publishers and some commercial entities. In September 2023, the independent German publisher De Gruyter announced that 85% of its 320 subscription journals would adopt the S2O model over the next five years. Publishers Taylor and Francis in the UK and Karger in Switzerland also announced that they would trial it for certain journals this year.
Whether the pilot continues in 2027 and beyond depends on whether BioOne meets its net subscription-revenue target by the end of next January, Kane says. Some partners, such as the California Digital Library, which is part of the University of California system, have committed to subscription licences spanning several years.
Sustainable and equitable
A number of publishers have already implemented the model, independently of the BioOne trial. For example, all 51 journals run by Annual Reviews, an independent, non-profit publisher in San Mateo, California, adopted S2O fully in 2023 after testing it on a handful of titles1. “For us, this has been an unqualified success,” says Richard Gallagher, an immunologist and editor-in-chief of Annual Reviews. He notes that the model has some “very strong advantages” over established forms of open access. “It’s a big equity play, it’s an affordability play and it transforms whole journals instead of individual articles.”
After seeing an increase in readership of the journal’s freely accessible content during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gallagher says the Annual Reviews team decided that it was a “moral imperative” to make its content openly available. Journals can charge article-processing fees (APCs) to make papers completely open access by having the authors cover publishing costs, such as administration, editing and typesetting. But Gallagher says charging APCs for review articles — which summarize and analyse the current state of research on a specific topic — wouldn’t have gone over well. “We cannot invite someone to spend three to six months writing a thorough review of their field and then present them with a bill to publish open access.”
Another option to avoid APCs is transformative agreements, in which universities or libraries pay a set amount to publishers to allow their researchers to publish their work openly and access paywalled content.
