A transformative journal was a subscription or hybrid journal that formally committed to increasing its open-access (OA) content year-on-year and to flipping fully to OA once a set threshold was reached. cOAlition S, the international funder consortium behind Plan S, ran the framework from 2021 to 2024 as a bridge for legacy subscription titles, then withdrew financial support after most titles failed to hit their compliance targets. This article explains what qualified, why the model was retired, and what cOAlition S funds in its place.
A transformative journal (TJ) is best defined in cOAlition S’s own terms: “a subscription/hybrid journal that is actively committed to transitioning to a fully Open Access journal,” required to grow its OA share annually and to offset subscription income against publishing fees so institutions were not charged twice.
- What was a Transformative Journal, exactly?
- How did Transformative Journals differ from hybrid journals?
- Why did cOAlition S withdraw support in 2024?
- What replaced the Transformative Journal model?
- Answer-first Q&A
- What this means for institutions and researchers now
What was a Transformative Journal, exactly?
A Transformative Journal was a formally recognised category within Plan S compliance, distinct from an ordinary hybrid title. To qualify and retain status, a journal had to meet three binding conditions set out in cOAlition S’s published criteria:
- Grow its OA share by at least 5 percentage points in absolute terms and 15% in relative terms every year, measured on Version of Record articles published under a CC BY licence.
- Commit to flip to full and immediate OA once its content reached a 75% open-access threshold, with no fixed flip date required after 2020 revisions to the criteria.
- Publish transparent pricing and offset subscription income against publication fees, to avoid “double-dipping” — charging both a subscription and an article processing charge (APC) for the same content.
Journals that missed their annual target were removed from the programme the following January, at which point the Journal Checker Tool (JCT) — the tool researchers used to verify a compliant publishing route — stopped listing them as a valid Plan S option.
How did Transformative Journals differ from hybrid journals?
cOAlition S drew a sharp line between an ordinary hybrid journal and a Transformative Journal because ordinary hybrid titles had, in its own analysis, failed as a transition mechanism. The table below sets out the practical distinctions.
| Feature | Ordinary hybrid journal | Transformative Journal (2021-2024) | Transformative Agreement (Read & Publish) |
|---|---|---|---|
| OA growth obligation | None | ≥5 pts absolute / ≥15% relative, yearly | Negotiated institution-by-institution |
| Flip commitment | None | Full OA once 75% threshold reached | Varies by contract term |
| Plan S compliant route | No | Yes, while status held | Yes, for covered institutions |
| Negotiated by | N/A | Publisher, applying to cOAlition S | Library consortia / country bodies |
| Funder financial support | N/A | Ended 31 December 2024 | Ended 31 Dec 2024 for cOAlition S centrally; some national exceptions continue |
The distrust of hybrid publishing was rooted in hard flip data cOAlition S cited when justifying the Transformative Journal criteria: of Wiley’s roughly 1,600 journals, only eight had converted from subscription to full OA; of Elsevier’s stable of more than 2,200 titles, only seven had flipped. That track record is why the Transformative Journal framework layered binding annual KPIs and a hard funding deadline onto what had, for hybrid titles, been a voluntary and largely unfulfilled promise.
Why did cOAlition S withdraw support in 2024?
cOAlition S always treated Transformative Journal funding as temporary. The Plan S Implementation Guidance set 31 December 2024 as the outer limit from the outset, but the decisive announcement came on 26 January 2023, when cOAlition S confirmed it would end financial support for all transformative arrangements — both Transformative Journals and Transformative Agreements — after 2024, and would stop accepting new TJ applications from 30 June 2023.
The compliance data behind that decision was stark. On 20 June 2023, cOAlition S removed 1,589 of 2,326 Transformative Journal titles — 68% of the entire programme — for failing their annual OA growth targets, as reported by Times Higher Education and Science. The same reporting found that only around 1% of TJ titles had flipped to full open access by January 2023, and just 695 titles (30%) had met or exceeded their growth KPI. A follow-up cOAlition S analysis of the 2023 reporting round found that 56% of the titles that survived the first cull still failed to hit their growth targets the following year.
cOAlition S’s own explanation, published alongside the withdrawal announcement, is unambiguous: continuing to fund transformative arrangements beyond 2024 would “significantly increase the risk that these arrangements will become permanent and perpetuate hybrid Open Access, which cOAlition S has always firmly opposed.” In other words, the model was retired not because open access growth stalled everywhere, but because the transitional bridge itself was at risk of becoming the destination.
What replaced the Transformative Journal model?
cOAlition S did not simply stop funding transitional routes; it redirected support toward mechanisms it judged more likely to deliver full and immediate OA. Three strands now dominate its compliance thinking:
- Full-OA Publishing Agreements — a newer category of institution/consortium contract that funds publication only in venues making all peer-reviewed articles immediately open access, rather than a mixed subscription-plus-APC model.
- Diamond and community-led OA — journals and platforms that charge neither authors nor readers, which cOAlition S now frames as the preferred long-term structural fix rather than a market-mediated transition.
- Transparency tooling — continued use of the Journal Comparison Service for price transparency and the cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy, which lets authors retain enough rights to deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript under CC BY regardless of a journal’s OA status.
Transformative Agreements (Read & Publish deals negotiated by library consortia, such as the Jisc-Wiley and Bibsam-Elsevier deals) are treated differently from Transformative Journals: cOAlition S ended its own central financial backing after 2024 but explicitly left room for individual national funders to keep supporting Read & Publish agreements as part of domestic strategy, and library consortia retain the mandate to negotiate them.
Answer-first Q&A
What are transformative journals?
Transformative journals were subscription or hybrid titles formally recognised by cOAlition S between 2021 and 2024 as a Plan S-compliant publishing route, conditional on hitting binding annual open-access growth targets and eventually flipping to full OA.
How do transformative journals differ from hybrid journals?
Unlike ordinary hybrid journals, which had no obligation to grow their OA share, Transformative Journals had to demonstrate measurable annual progress, avoid double payments through offsetting, and commit to a full OA flip — conditions enforced by removal from the Journal Checker Tool if missed.
Why did cOAlition S withdraw support for transformative journals?
cOAlition S withdrew support because most titles missed their targets — 68% were removed in June 2023 alone — and because continued funding risked making the “transitional” hybrid model permanent, contradicting Plan S’s core opposition to hybrid open access.
What replaced the transformative journal model?
cOAlition S redirected support toward Full-OA Publishing Agreements, diamond and community-led open-access publishing, and existing transparency tools such as the Journal Comparison Service and the Rights Retention Strategy, all aimed at immediate rather than gradual open access.
What this means for institutions and researchers now
For research administrators and library staff, the practical consequence is that Transformative Journal status is no longer a live Plan S compliance route: any title still listed as a former TJ in older guidance should be re-checked against the current Journal Checker Tool, since post-2024 publication fees for former TJ titles are not funder-covered unless the journal qualifies through another route, such as a live Transformative Agreement or full OA status.
For authors funded by cOAlition S members, the safest compliance paths going forward are: publishing in a fully OA journal, publishing via an active Transformative Agreement negotiated by their institution or consortium, or depositing the Author Accepted Manuscript under the Rights Retention Strategy when neither applies. The retirement of the Transformative Journal category is a useful case study in how funder mandates evolve once evidence of a policy’s underperformance becomes clear — a pattern research administrators should expect to see repeated as other transitional open-access mechanisms face similar reviews before the end of the decade.
