Better together: the promise of cooperative OA journal models

"Introduced by Annual Reviews in 2017, the initial iteration of the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model, where a publisher commits to making its journals fully OA for the year if enough institutions subscribe to cover the costs, is inherently cooperative. It relies on libraries pooling their resources to support a common goal, which aligns with the topic of this blog post and is well worth noting.

There’s also a new approach to the S2O model taking shape with the potential to expand the value of agreements for libraries — publisher and aggregator collaborations. Project MUSE, the leading humanities and social sciences database out of Hopkins Press and Johns Hopkins University, was the first to pilot such a model with the launch of MUSE S2O earlier this year. In a recent Scholastica blog interview, Bill Breichner, Journals Director at Hopkins Press, discussed the launch of the program, wherein participating publishers’ journals become fully OA if enough institutions subscribe to the various MUSE collections to meet a set revenue threshold....

Something that’s been interesting to see at Scholastica in recent years is more examples of societies and associations partnering to jointly publish Diamond OA titles. Examples include: Mires and Peat, which is jointly published by the International Mire Conservation Group and International Peatland Society, and the International Journal of Psychiatric Trainees, the official journal of the European Federation of Psychiatric Trainees, co-published with the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology....

As discussed on this blog before, we also see developing nonprofit publisher cooperatives, with some designed to help members access infrastructure that may otherwise be cost-prohibitive for them, such as The Scholarly Publishing Collective launched by Duke University Press in 2022. While not focused on OA publishing, such initiatives could indirectly support OA efforts at small and medium publishers by helping them free up critical resources....

Finally, I want to take a moment to highlight one of the first novel cooperative OA publishing approaches to come to my attention at Scholastica, the overlay journal model. Over the past 20 years, the concept of overlay publishing, or layering journals on top of existing repository platforms, has developed from a “theory to test out” to a recognized and growing journal model. In overlay publishing, a journal reviews and links to content hosted on a preprint server...."