The Royal Society Moves to Subscribe to Open

In August, the Royal Society announced plans to make our eight subscription journals open access (OA) on a Subscribe to Open (S2O) model in 2026. In doing so, we will deliver equitable open access for thousands of authors and readers each year, with no APCs charged, and make the world’s oldest continuously published scholarly journal—Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—free to read for everyone.

Why are we Moving to S2O?

Our journey to S20 has been a long one, rooted in two of our core objectives: having an “international and global focus” and being a “visible leader on open science, academic freedom and integrity in science” (The Royal Society, 2020). We published our first open access article in 2006 and launched our first OA journal, Open Biology, in 2011. The following year we introduced our transparent pricing mechanism (TPM), which committed us to reduce subscription prices as the percentage of our articles that were open access rose. Royal Society Open Science—covering all STEM subjects—was launched in 2014. In 2020, the Society pledged to convert all of its journals to OA. The signing of our first read-and-publish agreements followed in 2021. These agreements accelerated our transition, with our subscription journals moving from 17 percent OA in 2020 to 60 percent in 2024. We viewed this as excellent progress.

Two events in 2024 made us rethink our approach. First, our OA content increased so rapidly that the TPM triggered a 10 percent reduction in our subscription rates. Second, cOAlition S ceased paying APCs to hybrid subscription journals through its Transformative Journals scheme. These two big financial hits were all the more uncomfortable as the TPM had been designed with the expectation that APCs would offset price reductions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the proportion of open access articles in our subscription journals fell to 55 percent in the first half of 2025. We needed a course correction.

After reviewing possible alternatives, we selected S2O, attracted by four aspects of the model: its simplicity; that it would allow us to move to 100 percent OA in one stroke; its inherent equity; and the way it would expand our reach. Additionally, we were encouraged by the good experience publishers such as Annual Reviews and Berghahn Books have had with S2O and the positive feedback on the model we heard from many librarians. (Note: Annual Reviews is the publisher of Katina.) After detailed modelling and discussion within the Society, we agreed to proceed with S2O for 2026.

The S2O transition will involve further financial pain for the Royal Society—foregoing APCs on the subscription journals from funders outside cOAlition S, inter alia—but it will provide equitable access to our journals and enable the Society to fully deliver on its mission to promote science globally.

How will S2O Work in Practice?

We have sent renewal letters to all of our existing subscribers, inviting them to continue to support our subscription journals as we move to S2O in 2026. We are also talking to our read-and-publish and consortial customers. If we have reached our revenue target by the end of January 2026, the journals will convert to open access. If there is not enough support, they will carry on with a traditional subscription model for the year.

For simplicity, we will provide free access to the eight subscription journals for all existing customers in January and February 2026. If we are close to our revenue target at the end of December, we will publish all January articles under a CC-BY license, so everyone is clear about our proposition.

S2O will enable the Royal Society to deliver greater openness and equity for the same expenditure by our library partners, while maintaining rigor in peer review, relevance, transparency and high-quality content. These are core values for many libraries around the world, aligning our goals more closely with those of the library community.

If we meet our revenue target, S2O will provide benefits for library supporters, including:

• Access to 20 years of archive files that customers would not otherwise have— some 28,000 articles in total
• Flat pricing in year two and year three if customers sign up for a three-year agreement
• Predictable and reasonable pricing through our Fair & Transparent Pricing policy
• No APCs for their researchers on the eight subscription journals

Wider benefits of S2O will include:

• All articles published in 2026 will be permanently OA and have a CC-BY licence
• Authors and readers will pay no fees
• The Society’s journals will comply with all funder OA mandates
• There will be no additional cost for libraries or funders
• The transition will be operationally simple for librarians
• Readership of the journals outside core subscriber areas will grow, in particular in the Global South—and very likely citation rates will increase
• Access to high quality science will increase for researchers everywhere

This is a significant improvement on the value proposition of the existing subscription model.

In future years, the S2O renewal cycle will continue, with the eight journals staying open access provided that library support remains robust. We are keen to gather feedback on S2O as we move forward, so we can fine tune the model to best suit the needs of our library partners.

Some Questions Answered

The response to our S2O plans has been deeply heartening. We have received many positive words and in August, when we were still sending our renewal letters out, early commitments from two libraries. We have also been asked detailed questions about how the model will work, which is natural given such a major change.

We address three of the most common questions here.

Which journals will be covered by S2O?

The Royal Society’s eight subscription journals will move to S2O for 2026. These are Biology Letters, Interface, Interface Focus, Notes and Records, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences and Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Between them, these journals published more than 2,000 articles in 2024.

It is particularly pleasing that Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—the world's longest-running scientific journal—has committed to becoming an open access publication in its 360^th anniversary year.

Royal Society Open Science and Open Biology are not part of the S2O program and will continue to charge APCs. In future, we would like to find a way to move these journals to equitable OA. Biographical Memoirs will carry on as a diamond open access journal funded by the Royal Society, with no charges for authors or readers.

Will the Royal Society still offer read-and-publish agreements?

Yes, we will. Since we launched them in 2021, our read-and-publish agreements have been extremely popular. They now account for more than half of the revenue we receive from library and consortia customers and cover almost 700 institutions on six continents.

We will continue to provide customers the choice between subscribing to our S2O journals and signing a read-and-publish agreement that covers all access and publication charges for both our S2O and APC journals.

Will there be additional charges on top of library S2O support?

No, our eight subscription journals will be entirely supported by S2O payments.

The Royal Society used to have page charges on its journals that generated significant revenue. We discontinued them in 2022, viewing them as incompatible with our journey to open access.

Is the S2O Model Sustainable?

A frequent challenge to S2O has been how it will deal with the problem of non-participating users who benefit without contributing—so-called “free riders.” The suggestion is that if a journal can be viewed without a library paying a subscription, that library will feel tempted (or pressured, in a time of strained budgets) to cancel the freely accessible journal. This is a fair question.

S2O is designed with a protection against this problem. If a significant bloc of current subscribers chooses not to support our S2O initiative, the Society’s journals will remain subscription-only publications in 2026. Would-be free riders will then need to pay to get access to the journals.

Generally, though, we are more interested in giving libraries positive reasons to support S2O, including exclusive access to 20 years of archive files and multi-year agreements, as mentioned above.

In addition to helping to make library budgeting predictable, multi-year agreements should mean that we enter future S2O renewal years with a proportion of subscribers already committed to continue supporting the program, which will be very helpful for our planning.

Libraries can also subscribe through our multi-year read-and-publish agreements, which cover both our eight S2O journals and two APC-funded journals.

Lastly, inspired by the pioneering collaborations of ProjectMUSE and BioOne, we are exploring the formation of a S2O science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) sales collective to make it simpler for libraries to back S2O initiatives.

Overall, we would like S2O to become deeply embedded in the STEM publishing ecosystem. It is cost neutral and a relatively small change through which libraries can enable entire journals to become open access. This combination of simplicity and transparency has generated enthusiasm for S2O among librarians the world over. Publishers now need to demonstrate to those librarians that in addition to being aligned with their missions, S2O delivers a return on investment that justifies their expenditure. With sensible features that make the S2O proposition work well for both libraries and publishing houses—like multi-year agreements, “premium benefits” for S2O supporters, and collective sales packages—S2O will continue to grow as a trusted and durable model for delivering open access.

The End of the Open Access Journey?

The Royal Society has a long tradition of publishing innovation, dating back 360 years to the launch of Philosophical Transactions, the first scientific journal. It is fitting that 20 years after publishing our first open access articles, we can now make everything we publish open access, delivering on our ambition to make the science in our journals freely accessible to everyone worldwide.

Clearly, this is not the end of the transition to open access. The scholarly publishing community has a huge amount of work still to do, in terms of both advancing equity and developing fair business models that can be as adaptable and long-lived as the traditional subscription has been. For this learned society’s journals, however, S2O is a great step toward a new, more open, and more equitable future.

References

The Royal Society. (2022). Strategic plan 2022–2027, p.3 and p.7. https://royalsociety.org/-/media/about-us/governance/royal-society-strategic-plan-2022-2027.pdf