Research and Scholarly Communications - Blog - Library Guides at University of Sunderland

The theme of Open Access week this year is “Community over commercialization”.

Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing.

Theme 4. Subscribe to Open

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is a community of practice developed by the non-profit scholarly publisher Annual Reviews. The initiative is a response to the need for open access, and to the difficulties associated with implementing that movement.

S2O describes itself as a ‘pragmatic approach’ for converting traditional subscription journals to ones that offer open access to their archives. This works by allowing subscribers to essentially fund OA through their current subscriptions: if every subscriber agrees, the publisher makes the content of that title OA.

This alleviates the need for APCs – a model which is extremely problematic, and in many disciplines, such as the humanities, to say nothing of researchers working in the global south, almost unworkable given the limited funding available.

So far, over 300 journals are employing the subscribe-to-open model, including some titles published by some of the most influential academic publishers such as Sage, De Gruyter, and the University of Edinburgh Press.

This is a radical initiative that aims to ‘flip’ gated research to OA without incurring the questionable practices of ‘double-dipping’ (where institutions were often paying their authors’ APCs, whilst also having to subscribe to the titles in which those papers appeared). It’s dependent upon close collaboration between all the stakeholders involved in academic publishing: the researchers who create the content, the publishers who distribute it, and the libraries who facilitate the eventual dissemination of that research. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

A brief summary of the case for S2O presented by John Willinsky to the National Academy of Sciences Journal Summit, March 22, 2021

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