22 February 2023

EMS Press publishes methodology for sustainable open access with Subscribe to Open

André Gaul

After successfully introducing the model in 2020, EMS Press has continued to grow its Subscribe to Open offering in each year since. In this article we explore the methodology used to achieve fair and sustainable open access, with the implementation of sustainability thresholds.

EMS Press Open Access

In June 2020, EMS Press announced that ten journals would be published under the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model for open access publishing. In February 2021 we announced the success of this round, and in the following years were able to expand the programme to seventeen and then twenty-one journal titles, and their subsequent successful flip to open access. This growth has been the result of carefully derived and closely monitored sustainability thresholds. Each title is assessed against its own threshold, the attainment of which triggers the flip to open access.

In this newly-published article, we explore the methodology that EMS Press uses to determine whether a journal is published as open access during a given subscription year by implementing these thresholds. EMS Press chose S2O to make its new Open Access program sustainable and fair – and unsurprisingly those are the two core criteria in our calculation. In addition we explore the benefits of using such a calculation to determine the health of the portfolio as a whole, and indicate how revenues are distributed within the “solidarity” model for maximum efficacy. 

To understand how these factors are defined and formulated into a numeric calculation, download and read the full article [PDF].


Please contact info@ems.press with all enquiries.

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  • Journals
  • Open Access
  • Press News
  • Subscribe To Open