Is Subscribe to Open Good for Libraries?

As librarians, we aim to strategically invest our collection funds to support open access publishing as much as possible. For journals, these models include read and publish agreements, diamond open access, and more recently, Subscribe to Open (S2O).

Read and publish models can often be unaffordable for libraries, especially if they include a large publishing fee on top of existing subscription costs. Diamond OA journals, while fee-free for libraries, lack incentives for financial support and can, as a result, struggle with sustainability. The S2O model offers another affordable, and sustainable, method for advancing open access in which libraries continue to pay their historical subscription costs without any additional publishing fees. If enough institutions continue their subscriptions, then an entire year’s content is made permanently open access, with the added benefit of free open access publishing for all authors, everywhere.

Even though we come from different research libraries with individual collection strategies and funding for open access, we all support S2O. In this article, we’ll discuss the model’s advantages and its challenges and offer a few suggestions for improvement.

What We Like About S2O

Overall, we appreciate the S2O model for its practical and positive approach to open access. The model is creative yet pragmatic, fitting seamlessly within existing library subscription workflows and systems, including ordering, discovery systems, complex systems for tracking and evaluation of value, and other components of the process of managing subscriptions and access. This alignment makes it straightforward for libraries to evaluate whether to continue to participate during each renewal cycle. Many S2O journals are priced affordably, making participation feasible and sustainable even for libraries with limited budgets. The model allows for pragmatic, title-by-title decision-making, giving libraries the flexibility to cancel individual journals based on budget constraints while encouraging them to sustain support where possible. S2O makes more content open, providing benefits to libraries that would not otherwise have access. Indeed, buying in to make a journal open access can reduce costs across libraries for interlibrary loan, a collateral benefit of S20. Further, we value that S2O publishers share concrete data about what funding is needed to sustain operations. This transparency is a refreshing alternative to the opaque pricing and automatic annual increases common in traditional subscription models.

S2O also provides a supportive and necessary model for journals that cannot easily utilize article processing charge (APC) or read-and-publish frameworks. It is useful for publications that include significant non-research article content, such as review articles, commentary, letters to the editor, and book reviews. By enabling free open access publishing for all authors, S2O removes barriers to participation and promotes equity.

We appreciate that S2O can operate on benign neglect, where doing nothing does good: when libraries simply maintain their subscriptions, they actively contribute to making content freely available to everyone. S2O allows library workflows to default to success.

Finally, S2O encourages capacious thinking about open access models generally, including ways for libraries to fund open access monographs and digital collections.

Where We Have Reservations

From a library perspective, Subscribe to Open offers many advantages over other open access business models, but it also presents several challenges. Within the S2O Community of Practice, librarians have observed that the simplicity of the model can be illusory, obscuring complexities that can be difficult to understand and even harder to communicate. In particular, the contingent nature of S2O, one of its defining features, can lead to confusion about which content is open and which is closed. This creates significant metadata and electronic resources management concerns and makes it difficult for authors to understand whether their work will be open or paywalled, a particular concern for those subject to funder mandates to make their work publicly available.

While its seamless integration into existing workflows is generally a benefit, S2O subscriptions present libraries with some new assessment questions. Especially in difficult budget times, libraries may see S2O titles as “easy” targets for cuts because they can gamble that the revenue target will be met without their participation, preserving their access to the content. Since many libraries are committed to open access and see S2O as a way to advance strategic goals and/or organizational values, publishers could encourage libraries to participate by sharing institutional contributor lists as well as their annual revenue or participation goals.

Finally, another inherent feature of the S2O model—that the transition from a conventional subscription to S2O happens without adjustments to library costs—means there is no mechanism for redistributing costs across libraries. For institutions that seek a rebalancing of expenses such that libraries pay for OA publishing rather than paywalled reading access, S2O does not advance this goal. That said, two-tiered versions of S2O that set a (reasonably) higher price for an OA guarantee for authors can address this issue. S2O also offers indirect savings for libraries that benefit more from reading access, as an overall increase in OA publication can reduce the cost of resource sharing.

Conclusion and Recommendations

To aid the S2O model’s expansion and success, we recommend that publishers offer an OA guarantee to authors from subscribing institutions. Doing so would alleviate communication challenges between librarians and authors, who already struggle to understand the differences between gold OA, green OA, and “public access.” Moreover, many authors are reluctant to publish an article with an uncertain OA future, especially if they need to comply with the new zero-embargo federal funding public access policies. If S2O publishers can reassure authors that publishing S2O will not compromise their funder compliance, the model will have a better chance of growing and gaining support from an important faction of the scholarly publishing world. If publishers cannot offer an OA publishing guarantee, we encourage them, at the very least, to allow authors to immediately deposit their accepted manuscript into a repository of the author’s choice. We also encourage publishers to write their green OA policies with authors in mind, to make them expansive, and to directly state that they allow authors to comply with federal funder public access policies. These actions will go a long way with authors and librarians.

We also recommend that metadata experts from libraries, publishers, and third parties—such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the OA Switchboard, and/or the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)—continue to work on solving the metadata challenges that come with the conditionality of the S2O publishing model. Because an S2O journal can change its status from closed to OA and back again each renewal cycle, the journal’s metadata may need to be updated on a regular basis. Current workflows don’t necessarily accommodate these updates, which may need to be made manually.

If publishers are interested in developing new journals that are born as S2O, we encourage them to engage with the S2O Community of Practice for the most current information and considerations. Because this is an important and evolving model, we also recommend that librarians, publishers, and infrastructure providers contribute to the public conversation about their experiences with S2O and related concerns, in Katina and other venues. This conversation must include perspectives from smaller institutions, perspectives on open access monographs, and perspectives on S2O’s metadata challenges and possible solutions.

Finally, we encourage publishers to be as transparent as possible. Librarians and authors alike would benefit from knowing a publisher’s financial threshold for a successful S2O year, how close a journal is to reaching that goal at any given time, and when the publisher will announce if a journal has met that threshold. This information will help authors who need or want to publish OA decide if they want to do so in a particular journal while also breeding goodwill in librarians. As this work develops, we encourage librarians and publishers to continue to build transparency. Publishers should share how profits are reinvested and indicate whether a sufficient surplus would allow the publisher to reduce subscription costs.

As librarians, we support the S2O publishing model and applaud its seamless integration with established library operations, its affordability, and its equitable and collaborative mission. It feels great to contribute to a global public good that, if successful, enables all authors everywhere to publish OA for free. We are encouraged by the proliferation of the S2O model since its inception in 2020 and hope that it will continue to be developed and adopted more broadly.