Coalition S strategy head criticises efforts from American Chemical Society, Elsevier and Springer Nature
Just over two-thirds of the ‘transformative journals’ permitted to receive funding from organisations participating in the Plan S open-access initiative are to be kicked out of the scheme for failing to meet their targets.
Under Plan S, a group of international funders require papers reporting research they have supported to be made openly available immediately under certain conditions. These include that the funders will only pay for publication in hybrid journals—which combine open-access and subscription options—if those journals have committed to transforming to full open access at a given rate.
Coalition S, the participating funder group, announced on 20 June that it would remove 1,589 out of 2,326 journals (68 per cent) from the transformative journals scheme. It said they failed to meet their requirements to increase their share of open-access content by 5 percentage points annually on an absolute basis and 15 per cent annually on a relative basis, and to revoke the subscription option once 75 per cent of articles are made openly available.
The scheme, launched in 2020, is designed to encourage the transition of subscription-based scholarly publishing to full and immediate open access.
Three publishers singled out
Coalition S head of strategy Robert Kiley emphasised in a blog post that 77 per cent of 1,721 participating journals published by Springer Nature, 63 per cent of 182 from Elsevier and 56 per cent of 64 from the American Chemical Society (ACS) failed to meet their targets for 2022 and would be removed from the scheme.
Six of the Springer Nature journals should have flipped to full open access, he said, adding that 11 of the publisher’s journals already had.
“It is especially discouraging to note that there are at least six titles, published by Springer Nature, which have been unilaterally withdrawn from the transformative journal programme, despite meeting [the] 75 per cent open-access penetration rate threshold,” Kiley said. “Even ignoring the question as to what content subscribers are still paying for, if a title is not prepared to flip at these levels of open access, the only logical conclusion is that they will never flip to full open access.”
Coalition S also reported data on the extent to which participating publishers have been reducing their subscription fees as their transformative journals make more content openly available. For example, it said that the journal Biology Letters, published by the Royal Society, had decreased its fee by 4.7 per cent even after accounting for inflation.
But Kiley said: “Unfortunately, many publishers—including ACS, Elsevier and Springer Nature—have continued to provide more generic statements, making it impossible for subscribers to verify that they are not actually paying for open-access content.”
Publishers respond
Springer Nature told Research Professional News that it expects half of the research papers it publishes to be open access by the end of 2024. It said it has found that transformative agreements with research organisations, covering open-access publication in multiple journals, are the “most effective way of transitioning to open access at scale, delivering three times more open-access growth than author choice publishing in our hybrid and transformative journals”.
“This in turn powers an increase in visibility for the final published version which researchers want to read and build on,” it added. “Our agreement in the UK has seen usage increase tenfold since 2015, whilst in the US our 2021 agreement with [the University of California] has seen downloads increase 180 per cent in a single year.”
Elsevier said that almost all of its 2,800 journals offer open-access publishing, that it has over 750 fully open-access journals and that it has transformative agreements with over 2,000 institutions. It said that in 2022 it published over 150,000 open-access articles, for an annual growth rate of over 26 per cent.
“We provide openly and transparently key information about our processes, pricing, editorial policies and many other metrics of importance to our communities. And we continue to provide more information every year,” it added.
“We are pleased that 61 of our journals in the programme grew their open access content by more than 5 per cent, meeting the criteria set by Coalition S. A further six journals had sufficient support from their communities to flip to become fully…open access journals. We believe this demonstrates our commitment to work with institutions and authors to support open access.
“For other journals, however, there has simply not been sufficient funding nor appetite from the community to grow open access at the high rates demanded by Coalition S despite our clear offer of open-access publishing option to every author. We are disappointed that Coalition S has chosen to remove this source of funding…Our experience is that restricting funding for [certain forms of] open access makes it harder for authors to publish open access and will slow down progress towards a more open future.”
ACS said that the subscription prices of its hybrid journals are affected only by changes in subscription content. “Open-access articles are not considered when setting the subscription price, nor are article publishing charges affected by non-open access articles,” it said.
Funding to be phased out
Coalition S said that 1 per cent of the journals in the transformative programme had flipped to full open access, 30 per cent had met their targets and would remain in the programme, and 1 per cent were removed for reasons unrelated to their performance, such as because they had changed publisher.
Seven of 16 participating publishers met the targets for all of their journals, and Kiley said that society publishers seemed to be more successful in doing so than commercial publishers.
But he added: “The fact that so many titles were unable to meet their open-access growth targets suggests that for some publishers, the transition to full and immediate open access is unlikely to happen in a reasonable timeframe.”
This means that Coalition S chose well in planning to remove all support for transformative journals from the end of 2024, he added. Those journals that are being removed from the scheme for failing to meet their targets will not be eligible for funding from 1 January 2024.