CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: open access publishing

  • What Was a Transformative Journal? (2021-2024)

    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?

    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.

  • Open Access Mandate Compliance: What Seven Years of Plan S Data Show

    Seven years after cOAlition S launched Plan S in September 2018, the question is no longer whether funder mandates can move the needle on open access mandate compliance — it is what, specifically, moved, and what stayed stuck. cOAlition S’s own monitoring reports, rather than advocacy claims on either side, now give a reasonably clear evidence base for answering that.

    What Plan S Set Out to Achieve

    Plan S was convened through Science Europe with backing from the European Commission and the European Research Council. Its ten principles required that, from an implementation date eventually set at 1 January 2021 (pushed back a year from the original 2020 target), research funded by signatory organisations be published immediately open access, under an open licence, with no embargo.

    The coalition grew to more than two dozen public and philanthropic funders, including UKRI, Wellcome, and — aligned in principle if not formal membership — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Crucially, Plan S explicitly disfavoured hybrid subscription journals unless covered by a time-limited “transformative arrangement.”

    The Compliance Data: What Changed Since 2018

    Two mechanisms did most of the practical work. The Rights Retention Strategy, introduced in 2021, lets authors attach a CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript at submission — enabling compliant Green open access regardless of a publisher’s stated embargo. The Journal Checker Tool, launched the same year jointly with Wellcome and UKRI, lets authors verify funder-compliant routes journal by journal before submitting.

    According to cOAlition S’s own 2023 Annual Review, around 80% of research outputs from coalition-funded grants were published open access — above the roughly 60% global baseline for research generally. That gap is the strongest single piece of evidence that mandate-plus-tooling outperforms voluntary policy alone.

    • Gold OA (immediate, via publisher) became the most-used compliant route.
    • Green OA via the Rights Retention Strategy grew as a no-cost alternative.
    • Compliance has been consistently stronger in STEM fields than in humanities and social sciences, where funding structures differ.

    Publisher Pricing and Journal Behaviour

    Publisher behaviour shifted more than pricing transparency did. Transformative agreements — contracts bundling subscription access with open-access publishing rights — proliferated rapidly after 2018, particularly across Europe and North America; by 2024 they were supporting open-access status for well over 300,000 publications, accounting for a substantial share of global gold OA output.

    That growth came with a cost concern cOAlition S itself flagged: article processing charges concentrated financial risk on authors and institutions rather than reducing it. In response, cOAlition S announced it would stop funding “transformative journals” specifically after the end of 2024, and co-published an Action Plan for Diamond Open Access with Science Europe and OPERAS to seed no-fee, community-run alternatives.

    Route Author cost Plan S compliance status
    Gold (fully OA journal) Article processing charge, often funder-paid Compliant
    Green (Rights Retention Strategy) None Compliant, no embargo
    Hybrid via transformative agreement Bundled into institutional deal Compliant, time-limited
    Diamond/community-led None Compliant, prioritised post-2024

    The unresolved piece is longform outputs. A recent British Academy report found Book Processing Charges from larger publishers typically run £10,000–£20,000 per title, against a UKRI block-grant cap of £10,000 — and that only 18% of book records in UK institutional repositories actually hold the full text. The UK’s own REF 2029 exercise will not mandate open access for monographs this cycle; Research England confirmed in December 2024 it will apply from the following assessment period, from January 2029.

    Common Questions on Open Access Mandates

    What is an example of an open access initiative?

    Plan S is the clearest example: a funder-driven mandate launched by cOAlition S in 2018 requiring immediately open, freely reusable publication of any research these funders finance. Members include UKRI, Wellcome, the European Commission, and national research councils across more than a dozen countries.

    Do authors have to pay for open access?

    Not necessarily. Plan S’s Rights Retention Strategy lets authors deposit a CC BY-licensed accepted manuscript in a repository at no cost, satisfying compliance without an article processing charge. Gold open access typically requires a publication fee, which is why cost remains the mandate’s most contested feature.

    What are the disadvantages of open access?

    Critics point to article processing charges shifting costs from readers to authors, disadvantaging researchers at under-resourced institutions and in the Global South. Smaller and society publishers have struggled to compete for transformative agreements, and humanities disciplines have seen slower, patchier compliance than STEM fields.

    What exactly does open access mean?

    Open access mandate compliance means meeting a funder’s specific publishing requirements — typically an approved licence (usually CC BY), a maximum embargo period, and deposit in a recognised repository or journal. cOAlition S tracks this through annual monitoring reports rather than self-certification alone.

    What This Means for Institutions and Researchers

    For research administration teams, the practical upshot is that compliance now runs on tooling, not trust: the Journal Checker Tool and Rights Retention Strategy shifted the burden of proof from post-hoc audits to pre-submission checks. That has measurably raised article-level compliance rates without waiting for every journal to convert to full open access.

    It has not, however, solved cost equity. Institutions negotiating transformative agreements have effectively subsidised large commercial publishers’ transition, while smaller and society publishers, and now book publishers, face a structurally different cost problem that article-level mechanisms don’t reach. Consulting a shared reference point such as CASRAI’s open research dictionary can help teams keep licensing and embargo terminology consistent across funder policies.

    Where Plan S Goes Next

    cOAlition S’s 2023 “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal signalled a pivot away from journal-brand mandates toward funder-supported repositories and article-level open access, still under consultation. Combined with the Diamond Open Access Action Plan and the UK’s REF 2029 timeline for monographs, the next phase of Plan S looks less like a single global rule and more like a set of interoperating, funder-specific mechanisms — a shift that will make monitoring data, not policy text, the real measure of what “compliance” ends up meaning.

  • Towards Responsible Publishing: cOAlition S’s Vision for a Post-APC Scholarly System

    What Is the Towards Responsible Publishing Proposal?

    Towards Responsible Publishing is a draft proposal published by cOAlition S — the international consortium of research funders behind Plan S — in October 2023. It sets out a vision and a set of principles for a future scholarly communication system, together with a mission that enables funders, working with other stakeholders, to help deliver it.

    The proposal builds directly on Plan S, the 2018 funder commitment to full and immediate open access. Five years on, cOAlition S argues that publishing practice has not kept pace with how research is actually produced, shared and used. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how slow traditional peer-reviewed publishing can be when speed matters, accelerating researcher adoption of preprints, open peer review and scholar-led “diamond” publishing models that charge neither authors nor readers.

    Where Plan S targeted the terms of open-access mandates, Towards Responsible Publishing targets the underlying business model. cOAlition S describes subscription charges and, over time, article processing charges (APCs) as “highly inequitable” — since both make publication and access contingent on institutional or author ability to pay — and proposes shifting the system towards one that authors, not payment capacity, control.

    The Principles cOAlition S Sets Out for a Post-APC System

    Rather than mandating a single replacement model, the proposal frames a direction of travel. The themes that run through the proposal and its subsequent consultation include:

    • Author control over dissemination — researchers decide when and how their work is shared, rather than being routed through a single high-cost venue.
    • Preprinting as a default step — early, open sharing of findings ahead of formal peer review, already the practice cOAlition S credits with speeding up pandemic-era science communication.
    • Open, transparent peer review — reports published alongside articles, with the consultation later finding a researcher preference for reviewer anonymity even within open models.
    • Permissive, open licensing — enabling reuse without funder mandates being experienced as impositions on academic practice.
    • Redirected resourcing — shifting funds currently spent on subscriptions and APCs towards scholar-led and community-owned publishing infrastructure over time.

    The following table sets out how the three dominant funding models compare on who pays and where the equity risk sits — the core tension the TRP proposal is trying to resolve.

    Model Who pays Reader access Main equity concern
    Subscription Institutions/libraries Paywalled unless subscribed Excludes under-resourced institutions from reading
    APC (gold OA) Author or their institution/funder Free to read Excludes under-resourced authors from publishing
    Diamond OA Funders, institutions, consortia (not per-article) Free to read Free to publish, but depends on sustained collective funding

    The Global Consultation and the Diamond Open Access Connection

    Because a scholar-led system depends on buy-in from the research community it is meant to serve, cOAlition S commissioned a global consultation, delivered by Research Consulting and Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), running from November 2023 to May 2024. It engaged more than 11,600 respondents worldwide: 440 responses to an initial stakeholder feedback survey, 72 focus-group participants, and 11,145 responses to an online global researcher survey — supplemented by 10 organisational feedback letters solicited specifically to offset an initial underrepresentation of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

    The published findings, released via Zenodo in mid-2024, showed broad cross-regional and cross-disciplinary support for preprint posting, permissive licensing and open peer review. But they also surfaced a hard constraint: researchers, particularly in LMICs, remain dependent on journal indexes and impact factors when choosing where to publish, because career and funding assessment still rewards them. Without reform of research assessment running in parallel, the consultation warned, TRP risks being read as an imposition by well-resourced nations on researchers who cannot easily disengage from prestige metrics.

    This is precisely where diamond open access enters the picture. Diamond journals and platforms — typically scholar-led, community- or institution-owned, and free to both authors and readers — are the closest existing proof that a non-APC system can function at scale. cOAlition S’s own account of the “developments forcing a rethink” explicitly names diamond models pioneered in Latin America as evidence that scholar-led publishing services are viable, not theoretical. Search demand data reinforces the parallel interest: “diamond open access” and comparison queries such as “diamond open access vs gold open access” show sustained monthly search volume, indicating institutions and researchers are actively trying to map their own funding-model choices onto exactly the debate TRP is having at the funder level.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is the Towards Responsible Publishing proposal?

    Towards Responsible Publishing (TRP) is a draft proposal published by cOAlition S in October 2023 that sets out a vision and set of principles for a future scholarly communication system less dependent on subscription and article-processing-charge funding, alongside a mission for funders to help deliver it.

    How many researchers took part in the cOAlition S consultation on TRP?

    Over 11,600 respondents took part between November 2023 and May 2024, run by Research Consulting and Leiden University’s CWTS, comprising 440 stakeholder-survey responses, 72 focus-group participants and 11,145 responses to a global researcher survey.

    Does Towards Responsible Publishing abolish APCs immediately?

    No. The proposal and its consultation findings point to a phased transition: encouraging preprints and open licensing in the short term, open peer review in the medium term, and reforming incentives and funding flows away from APCs only over the longer term.

    How does Towards Responsible Publishing relate to diamond open access?

    TRP treats diamond open access — publishing that is free to both authors and readers, typically run by scholar-led or institutional platforms — as a proof point that scholarly communication can work without per-article charges, and frames redirecting resource towards such infrastructure as a long-term goal.

    Implications for Research Administrators and Institutions

    For research offices, libraries and funders, TRP is not yet a mandate — it is a signal of direction that carries planning consequences well before any policy takes effect.

    • Budget modelling: institutions that have built read-and-publish or transformative agreements around APC-equivalent spend should model what a partial shift of that spend towards diamond infrastructure funding would look like.
    • Assessment reform: the consultation’s own finding — that journal prestige metrics still drive author behaviour — means research administrators supporting responsible research assessment (aligned with DORA-style commitments) are addressing a root cause TRP itself identifies, not a side issue.
    • Author guidance: research offices advising on authorship and publication strategy should track which venues already operate open peer review or preprint-first workflows, since early adoption reduces future compliance friction if funder policy converges on TRP principles.
    • Equity due diligence: institutions in LMICs, and those partnering with them, should note the consultation’s own caveat about underrepresentation and imposition risk when adopting TRP-aligned practices unilaterally.

    These are exactly the kind of process and policy interpretation questions that sit within the remit of research administration teams tracking funder requirements ahead of formal rollout.

    Outlook: What Happens Next

    cOAlition S committed to publishing a full response to the consultation findings, working through what a revised proposal would mean in practice for its member funders. The direction of travel is clear even where the timeline for full implementation is not: preprints and open licensing first, open peer review next, and structural reform of funding flows and assessment incentives as the long-term goal. Institutions, publishers and scholarly societies with a stake in how scholarly communication is funded have a genuine window to shape that revision rather than simply react to it once finalised.

    What distinguishes Towards Responsible Publishing from earlier reform pushes is its explicit acknowledgement that funder mandates alone cannot fix a system-level incentive problem — reform has to touch assessment, infrastructure funding and author behaviour simultaneously, or risk being another well-intentioned policy that the underlying prestige economy simply routes around.