The changing roles of scientific journals | mBio

"In the past, access to scientific articles was controlled by journal subscriptions, which are generally managed by librarians. In 1991, Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos National Laboratory established the arXiv repository, which made physics preprints freely available, an event that is considered to mark the beginning of the open-access movement (66). The open-access (OA) model requires authors to pay a publication fee (article processing charge [APC]) in exchange for the article being made free to access upon publication (67). BioMedCentral was the first commercial publisher to launch a series of open-access journals in the year 2000 in biology and medicine (68). Open access has become increasingly popular since then, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) featured 20,734 indexed journals as of August 2024 (69), with about half of all newly published papers now published via this route (70). The increase in open-access publications has been driven largely by recent funders’ stipulations that require research supported by their grants to be freely available upon publication. An example is the cOAlition S initiative announced in September 2018 by a group of research funders, which mandated research supported by public grants to be published without embargo in open-access journals or platforms starting in 2021, as laid out in Plan S (71). Similarly, the U.S. Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) issued a policy memo in August 2022 to federal departments and agencies, requiring federally funded research to be made freely available without delay (72). The rise of Plan S and other funder mandates stipulating that articles must be published under an open license has required publishers to pivot from a traditional subscription-based publication model to accommodate these new requirements. One major development in this area has been the rapid rise of transformative agreements between journals or publishers and authors’ institutions, in which payments from institutional subscribers are applied toward open-access publication costs instead of journal access paywalls (73). However, Plan S support for these transformative arrangements will cease as of 31 December 31 2024, and Plan S as well as other funder mandates do not financially support publication in so-called hybrid journals that publish both subscription and open access content. Publishers are responding by seeking alternative open access publication routes. One such example is the subscribe-to-open (S2O) model that requires yearly subscription thresholds to be met for journal content from that year to be published under an open access license. The journal Annual Reviews pioneered this model, and its advantages include reliance on a publisher’s existing subscriber base and compliance with funder OA policies (74). In July 2023, ASM announced that it will be converting its six primary research subscription-based journals to a subscribe-to-open model in 2025 (75). As these developments illustrate, the open access movement over the past three decades has significantly disrupted the scientific publishing enterprise and required adaptation by publishers, authors, and other stakeholders that will continue for the foreseeable future...."