Panel discussion and questions
On 26 September 2024, De Gruyter hosted 90 minutes of incredible conversation on how the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model may be the answer to a sustainable transition to open access. The webinar featured a moderator and speakers from Xiamen University, Australian National University, Annual Reviews, AIP Publishing and De Gruyter Brill to explore in detail the ins and outs of the S2O model for an open access future. Access the full recording or read the summary and panel discussion below to understand the perspective of both libraries and publishers.
Welcome
Chen Juan, Deputy University Librarian (Xiamen University), welcomed attendees and kicked off with an opening remark about the nature of open access publishing and evolving subscription paywalls.
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Panel discussion
Chen Juan, Deputy University Librarian (Xiamen University, China), moderated a discussion with four panellists, who provided insights on the different aspects of the Subscribe to Open model.
The featured speakers were:
- Roxanne Missingham, University Librarian, Australian National University
- Richard Gallagher, President and Editor-in-Chief, Annual Reviews
- Ben Ashcroft, Chief Commercial Officer, De Gruyter Brill
- Kevin Steiner, Head of Global Sales, AIP Publishing
Below is a summary of questions and answers (note that these are not full transcriptions).
How can the issue of regional income and expenditure imbalance be addressed under the S2O model?
Roxanne Missingham: I should start by saying I’ve done quite a lot of work at the University of Yangon (Myanmar), where they have significant challenges around access. And it’s an important example as well because their challenges aren’t just financials. There is also the problem with infrastructure, which impedes collaborative research. A number of the universities in the Asia Pacific region have very small and poorly funded libraries and are not able to support their communities in the way they would like to. They find it is beyond their means to be able to support access points and journals in the way they do in the West. It’s great to see a model that breaks down the financial model barrier, but I think there’s room for some deep thinking about what we would do to overcome other barriers.
Richard Gallagher: We need to put more effort into making sure that the knowledge from the global research community is equally available to everyone. I can see the time, and it’s approaching very quickly, where we’ll be able to deliver the content in different languages to people who are much more comfortable digesting knowledge in their own language.
Ben Ashcroft: The core of our project to open up the portfolio is to internationalise those journals, making them much more reflective of how academia really is globally rather than just the communities that have been able to access it. For all the cynicism that there is about open access and the progress that it has or hasn’t made, I think you see an overwhelmingly positive shift in favour of those geographies, which face very real challenges in access and original content. So, I think it is about taking one step at a time and making progress.
Would publishers look at a model that allowed funding for earlier journal issues or journals that failed to meet the financial threshold the first time around?
Ben Ashcroft: The first thing to say is that we now have over 50 journals in S2O, and we haven’t yet been confronted with the situation where we’ve had to put one back behind the paywall. One of our key goals has to be financial sustainability, and if we do have to seek an alternative way of transforming a particular journal because the S2O approach hasn’t worked, then we will do it. This is also the sort of conversation that I would very much welcome between publishers such as us and the academic institutions on how that could work and the possible sources of funding that can be tapped into.
If most or all journal articles in a journal were funded by APCs, how would that interact with S2O?
Kevin Steiner: AIP Publishing’s portfolio is quite diverse in terms of its different business models. I think for us in the near future, they’re going to live kind of in parallel together. In other words, we will have a mix of S2O journals, Gold OA and Diamond journals, but we are looking at doing things like APCs for authors where it makes sense. For example, the Gold OA journals have a barrier for entry for scientists who do not have the APC funding available. While some publishers have made adjustments to the APCs for people from lower-income countries, that is not sustainable in the long term. So it is very likely that these models will eventually evolve into some wider type of package where there is less barrier for research either for the author or for the readers.
Are there points to review that may accelerate or decelerate the transition?
Richard Gallagher: The academic publishing sector is incredibly complicated, with publishers of different sizes and different financial goals dealing with customers around the world in different circumstances. I do not think that Subscribe to Open is the endpoint of the open access journey. Discussion is the only way for this to happen. One of the great things about the Subscribe to Open programme has been how it has unified the stakeholders (publishers and librarians) who are interested in Subscribe to Open in a form of partnership that has not been seen in the industry for quite some time.
Participant questions
Does it mean that once the institution opts for a publisher’s S2O, we do not need to subscribe to the others?
Richard Gallagher: There are big differences in the subscriber portfolios of the humanities journals that De Gruyter Brill publishes and the physics journals that AIP Publishing publishes. In a perfect world, all journals will be supported by Subscribe to Open, where institutions will only need to subscribe to the things that are closest to their institutional priorities.
Ben Ashcroft: S2O is not a cross-publisher model. Each journal still needs to achieve a certain level of subscription number in order to make them open access. Maybe the model will evolve over time where, across publishers, we have some sort of structure in place that has that element of mutual support, but we are not there yet. Apart from that, there is the free rider problem, but actually, S2O is about enlightened self-interest. Librarians, by supporting the model, are really providing a significant service to their researchers, especially in those humanities and social sciences where funding is not often available. It is a relatively cost-efficient way of achieving open access and helping to guarantee that the journal stays in open access so that their researchers are able to publish.
In a S2O model, will the subscribing libraries have to pay APC to make articles open access if the subscription threshold is not attained?
Richard Gallagher: Annual Reviews is committed to publishing the work of authors from the institutions who have signed up for the S2O programme, even if eventually the journal does not get enough support to be flipped.
Ben Ashcroft: If S2O fails to work for certain journals, we have some consortium agreements where there will be guaranteed open access publication for the duration of the contract for authors from those institutions.
Kevin Steiner: For AIP Publishing, if those revenue thresholds are not met to flip the journal, institutions will need to pay for the article to be published open access.
What will happen when an S2O journal is over-subscribed?
Ben Ashcroft: S2O is mainly about sustainability, rather than about growth. And that’s possibly one of the reasons why the big commercial publishers have so far steered clear of it because it does not offer the sort of growth rates that their shareholders would be expecting. One of the financial questions is how do we finance the publication of those articles and keep those journals sustainable if the number of articles goes up steeply as a result of it being open? That is something that we will look at and continue to look at as we gain experience with the S2O model.
