This is a guest post by Christina Lembrecht and Ben Ashcroft of OASPA member De Gruyter about the recent announcement regarding the transformation of its journal portfolio via the S2O model.
This post represents the views of the authors and not OASPA.
De Gruyter was founded to support scholars, promote knowledge, and spread quality research to the widest possible audience. As a publishing model, open access hinges on the idea that the scientific and intellectual heritage of humankind should be open to all—without restrictions tied to wealth, status, or place of birth. There is thus much overlap between the vision which animates the open access movement and De Gruyter’s own founding mission. For more than fifteen years, this affinity has led De Gruyter to be an early and active supporter of open access publishing.
In keeping with our longstanding commitment to open access, 2023 saw De Gruyter adopt Subscribe to Open (S2O) as its main open access model. S2O is an innovative publishing model which provides for the sustainable transformation of gated journals to open access. Over the next five years, De Gruyter plans to transfer 85% of its 320 subscription journals to open access via S2O.
We are hugely excited about S2O. Not only in terms of its impact on our own portfolio—on average, the 9 journals we have transformed so far using S2O have seen an increase in usage of 700%, with readership from 2.8 times the number of countries compared with previously—but for what its wider adoption could do for both open access and the wider research community.
S2O offers huge benefits to readers, authors, publishers, and subscribing institutions alike. But what does that mean in practice? For readers, S2O means free and unlimited access to high-quality academic research. For scholars, it means being able to publish open access without incurring author fees—which the S2O model abolishes, because funding continues to be drawn from institutional budgets just as in the subscription model. For publishers who choose S2O, it means benefiting from the increased visibility and impact that is a hallmark of open access publishing, while retaining the financial and organizational stability provided by existing subscription models. Last but not least, S2O gives subscribing institutions of all sizes a simple and equitable means by which to support the global transition to open access.
We think S2O represents the fairest, most inclusive, most sustainable approach to open access transformation conceived to date. In the following, we set out our stall in full. We explain S2O’s key features, outline the reasons behind this decision, and discuss our experience of the model so far.
What is Subscribe to Open?
S2O enables the complete, immediate open access transformation of gated academic journals, contingent on institutional support. Here’s how it works.
Institutions subscribe to a S2O journal in the standard fashion, if enough institutions subscribe to an S2O journal in a given year, the current volume is “flipped” to open access. The journal then publishes this year’s volume under a Creative Commons license: freely accessible, open to all, incurring no publication fees (APCs) for authors.
Should the number of subscribers fall below a set value, the paywall reactivates. At this point, the journal reverts to a model whereby only subscribers have access. While paywalls are exactly what proponents of open access seek to avoid, this mechanism serves to ensure the long-term financing and economic viability of S2O journals. The aim is to avoid a situation whereby a subscriber delays payment in the hope the target is reached without their support. In this way, S2O provides a practical solution to the so-called collective access challenges faced by existing open access models.
That’s because S2O does not require charitable motives, collective coordination, or voluntary contributions to further the goal of open access transformation. Rather, it relies solely on the local self-interest of institutions subscribing to ensure guaranteed access to vital scholarly journals and enabling their authors to publish OA. In this way, S2O effectively leverages the combined heft of local self-interest and mission-led altruism in pursuit of a world where knowledge is free and unlimited for all.
Why did De Gruyter Choose Subscribe to Open?
We rely on S2O because, more than any other model, it represents a fair, inclusive, and sustainable approach to OA transformation which works for all journal types in disciplines across humanities, social sciences, and STEM.
Inclusivity:
The model is particularly inclusive for authors. Authors can publish open access—without APCs—in a journal of their choice. This means authors who wish to do so can benefit from open access, irrespective of institutional affiliation, location, or institutional budget.
S2O also covers journals from all disciplines, from humanities to social sciences and STEM. It can be used to finance open access for all publication formats in all journals, encompassing book reviews, opinion pieces, commentaries, and interviews, as opposed to achieving open access solely for original research articles.
Moreover, it allows all those who currently contribute to the publication system—including subscription agents and booksellers—to continue organizing journal subscriptions for their customers in the existing fashion. They therefore maintain their vital role in the academic publishing system. At the same time, S2O allows publishers of all sizes to partake in the open access transformation.
Lastly, flipping gated journals to open access brings research to a broader and more inclusive reading community than ever before. It directly furthers the central goal of open access: eliminating financial and geographic barriers by making scholarly knowledge available to all.
Fairness:
S2O also promotes fairness by creating a balanced and equitable approach to open access transformation. Paying subscribers retain guaranteed access to journals, while enabling and participating in the open access transformation of those journals. At the same time, S2O creates a fairer, more equitable route to publishing scholarly work in an unequal world. By abolishing APCs, scholars from around the world are free to publish in whichever journal they choose—without incurring a financial burden that can dissuade under-resourced scholars and institutions from participating in the global academic community. S2O thus provides a way to support the expansion of open access worldwide.
Sustainability:
S2O allows publishers of different sizes to gradually transform their journals in an economically sustainable way. By only offering guaranteed access to subscribers while simultaneously working toward open access, S2O prevents a sudden loss of subscribers.
Moreover, S2O allows journals to prioritize quality over quantity. Economic survival (or profitability) no longer depends on the sheer number of articles published. And because it recurs annually, S2O ensures ongoing participation and stable revenue streams.
What Does De Gruyter Expect from S2O?
As the model establishes itself in the world of publishing, we are certain to see more publishers choose S2O as a transformational model for open access. But while the benefits of this model are easy to explain, the decision to undertake any large-scale transformation is a difficult one.
We want to see more publishers working with S2O, and that’s why we think it’s important to spread word of the successes De Gruyter has witnessed so far. Here, the transition is already well underway. De Gruyter has successfully transformed 16 journals to open access via S2O, with almost 50 more expected to follow over the next two years. We are an active member of the S2O Community of Practice, working together with other publishers to promote the model.
Moreover, ours has been a uniformly positive experience. Subscribers have eagerly participated, while institutions, librarians, and researchers have widely endorsed our new model. Most importantly, researchers and readers all over the world have already benefited as content from journals becomes freely available via S2O. Usage of De Gruyter’s journal Linguistics—transformed via S2O in 2022—increased sevenfold over the previous year. At the same time, the number of countries which access our content has increased by almost three times – a substantial increase.
We are further steeled by the positive conversations we’ve had with librarians around the world. We know we can count on the long-term support from libraries for this model, because librarians are as interested as we are in finding a sustainable and quick route to open access. Overall, our experience with S2O has demonstrated a real community of interests across the entire scholarly community, including readers, researchers, librarians, publishers, and subscribers.
Why S2O is the best model for De Gruyter’s OA transformation
The benefits of open access to researchers, institutions, and the public are easy to grasp. The quest for a fair, inclusive, and sustainable open-access model has always proven more difficult. While the rainbow coalition of existing models—gold, green, diamond, platinum, hybrid, delayed—have all played a vital role in spreading scholarship beyond its traditional borders, they have also faced problems. Despite huge successes, we recognise that existing models have at times faced sustainability issues and caused avoidable tensions between stakeholders.
Working first-hand with open access for more than fifteen years has given De Gruyter a unique vantage point from which to judge the benefits and drawbacks of existing models. More committed than ever to the spread of open access, De Gruyter is eager to use its many years of knowledge to improve open access worldwide.
As an experienced supporter of open access and a trusted partner to scholars and research institutions worldwide, it is De Gruyter’s duty to advocate for the best form of open access conceived to date. After all, the surest way to expand open access is for the systems we use to be the best available. And it is precisely because we believe it to be the most inclusive, sustainable, and fairest open access model for all types of journals that De Gruyter advocates for large-scale open access transformation via S2O.
