Subscribe to Open

Subscribe to Open is the new business model of EMS Press for equitable and sustainable Open Access publishing.

EMS Press has made the decision to transition its portfolio of journal titles to Open Access. In making this decision, it was agreed that the society could not support a model that may present barriers to publication, and as such any model relying on APCs would not be suitable. Through rigorous analysis of the various remaining options available to the Press, we have elected to pursue a Subscribe to Open (S2O) business model. 

Transformative agreements, including Subscribe to Open pioneered by Annual Reviews, emerged as the most promising.  — SPA-OPS Report, 2019

The premise of S2O is very simple; libraries continue to subscribe to the Press’s journals and once a certain threshold of revenue has been achieved, the titles flip to being open access for the forthcoming year of subscription. Should the target not be achieved, subscribers are still granted full access to the content they have purchased, and any articles where funder requirements demand OA will be published as Green OA. S2O is effectively a read and publish agreement without the significant administrative complexity of APCs, and thus can be supported by smaller publishing operations such as ours, where the team is small and revenues are primarily intended to be driven back into publishing and society endeavours (we are owned by the not-for-profit organisation, the European Mathematical Society).

Update 27th May 2020: Our survey has now closed, thank you for your contributions. We will be publishing a report of our findings in the coming weeks.

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