cOAlition S Price Transparency: How the Journal Comparison Service Worked

• What Is the cOAlition S Price and Service Transparency Framework?
• How the Journal Comparison Service Worked
• Adoption Trajectory and the April 2025 Closure
• Implications for Libraries, Funders, and What Comes Next

cOAlition S, the funder coalition behind Plan S, spent five years building infrastructure meant to make open-access publishing costs auditable. cOAlition S price transparency requirements, first set out in guidance published on 18 May 2020, obliged publishers receiving Plan S-funded articles to disclose how article processing charges (APCs) and subscription fees break down across editorial, peer-review, production, and hosting services. The delivery mechanism for this — the Journal Comparison Service (JCS) — went live in 2022 and was retired on 30 April 2025. This explainer sets out what the Price and Service Transparency Framework required, how the JCS worked while it operated, and what its closure means for institutions still trying to benchmark open-access costs.

What Is the cOAlition S Price and Service Transparency Framework?

Plan S Principle 5 states that where open-access publication fees are applied, they must be “commensurate with the publication services delivered” and the fee structure must be transparent. To operationalise this, cOAlition S endorsed two independently developed frameworks for standardising what publishers disclose.

The first, commissioned from Information Power and funded by Wellcome and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), was piloted in early 2020 with ten publishers, including Springer Nature, PLOS, Hindawi, EMBO, and the Institute of Physics Publishing. It defines 24 metadata fields across three parts: journal bibliographic and pricing data, contextual quality metrics (acceptance rates, peer-review turnaround, publication frequency), and a percentage breakdown of list price across service categories.

The second, the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA) framework, groups disclosure into seven broader “service baskets” and has been adopted independently by Frontiers, MIT Press, Copernicus, and MDPI.

Under the Information Power model, publishers apportioned price across roughly eight cost categories, covering journal development and management, peer-review administration, production (typesetting, copy-editing), publication and hosting infrastructure, dissemination and marketing, general and administrative overheads, other costs, and surplus or profit margin.

How the Journal Comparison Service Worked

The Journal Comparison Service was a secure, free-of-charge online platform, built by Cottage Labs (working with Antleaf) on behalf of the European Science Foundation, which administers cOAlition S. It began accepting publisher submissions from May 2022 and opened to approved library, consortium, and funder users from September 2022.

Access was strictly partitioned: a publisher could see only its own submitted data, and authorised institutional users were bound by a legally binding agreement not to share the commercially sensitive figures — a design intended to satisfy competition-law concerns while still letting buyers compare value for money.

• Publishers registered and submitted journal-level data via the standard framework template.
• cOAlition S validated submissions and loaded them into the secure portal.
• Libraries, consortia, and funders applied for authorised access to browse and compare disclosed data.
• A companion tool, the Journal Checker Tool, flagged whether a given journal had submitted data to the JCS at all.

What is the cOAlition S Price and Service Transparency Framework?

It is a set of endorsed disclosure standards requiring publishers of open access journals to itemise how their fees break down across editorial, peer-review, production, and hosting services. cOAlition S endorsed two versions — one from Information Power and one from the Fair Open Access Alliance — so buyers could compare pricing on a like-for-like basis.

What must publishers disclose under the framework?

Publishers submit bibliographic details (journal name, ISSN, list prices), contextual quality metrics such as acceptance rate and peer-review turnaround, and a percentage breakdown of the total fee across defined service categories, including production, hosting, and administrative overhead.

Is the Journal Comparison Service still active?

No. cOAlition S discontinued the JCS on 30 April 2025 after registering only 105 end users and 163 access sessions in 2024, judging the service’s reach too limited to justify its running costs. The underlying disclosure frameworks remain endorsed in principle.

How did libraries and funders use the Journal Comparison Service?

Authorised library consortia and funders used JCS data to check whether APC and subscription charges were proportionate to services rendered, informing negotiation of transformative and read-and-publish agreements and internal guidance to researchers on cost-effective publishing choices.

Adoption Trajectory and the April 2025 Closure

The JCS launched strongly: 27 publishers agreed to share data at inception, covering more than 2,000 journals. Three years on, publisher participation had nominally grown to 37 — but the journals actually represented had collapsed to just 549, as several large early adopters scaled back or withdrew coverage.

Demand-side uptake was weaker still. By the end of 2024, only 105 individuals were registered as end users across all participating libraries, consortia, and funders worldwide, and the platform recorded just 163 access sessions for the entire year.

Faced with high maintenance costs against that usage, cOAlition S announced on 3 February 2025 that it would sunset the JCS effective 30 April 2025. In the announcement, cOAlition S acknowledged that the service had not fulfilled its original ambition, citing insufficient publisher journal coverage and limited registration among libraries and consortia relative to the cost of running the platform. The underlying source code has been released on GitHub for reuse by other organisations that want to build comparable tools.

Implications for Libraries, Funders, and What Comes Next

For research administrators and library staff who built workflows around JCS data, the closure removes a single, standardised comparison point — but not the underlying disclosure expectation. Plan S Principle 5 still requires that open-access fees be transparent and commensurate with services delivered; institutions negotiating transformative agreements will now need to request itemised pricing directly from publishers, or rely on the still-endorsed FOAA and Information Power framework templates as a negotiating checklist.

• Use the published framework templates directly with publishers during contract renewal or transformative-agreement negotiation.
• Treat the archived JCS guides and the GitHub codebase as a reference for building institution- or consortium-level comparison tools.
• Continue using the Journal Checker Tool to confirm a journal’s compliant open-access routes under Plan S, independent of JCS status.

The episode is a useful case study for anyone in research administration weighing whether to build shared infrastructure for cost transparency: a well-designed, funder-backed, free tool still failed to reach critical mass when neither side of the market — publishers submitting full catalogues, or libraries registering to use it — had a strong enough incentive to engage consistently. Readers building out institutional glossaries around APCs, transformative agreements, and related open-access terminology can cross-reference definitions in the CASRAI Dictionary.

cOAlition S has signalled it is not abandoning the transparency principle itself, even as the JCS platform closes. Institutions should expect price and service disclosure to remain a live negotiating point in open-access contracts, delivered through direct publisher engagement and framework templates rather than a centralised comparison portal, at least for the foreseeable future.