Academic publisher De Gruyter expands Subscribe to Open programme to accelerate Open Access

Academic publisher De Gruyter has announced plans to transform its journal portfolio to Open Access by 2028 through a Subscribe to Open (S2O) programme.

Via the programme, De Gruyter will gradually transfer approximately 85% of its 320 subscription journals to free online access via S2O, “in close collaboration with journal editors and societies”.

The publisher says it is the first major academic publisher to use S2O as its central Open Access transformation model. Currently, De Gruyter offers 16 journals as open access via S2O. Another five will follow in 2024, and the publisher plans to transfer around 40 journals to Open Access by 2025.

By 2028 around 270 De Gruyter journals are scheduled to be available as open access titles via S2O. In the pilot phase, the publisher says it has had a positive experience with S2O as “a sustainable transformation model, especially for humanities journals”. It adds that the participation of subscribing institutions has been high, and responses have been positive.

“Compared to other models, Subscribe to Open offers advantages for all stakeholders in the publication system. Authors can publish their articles in established journals on an Open Access basis at no additional cost. Libraries retain guaranteed access to journals through their subscription, while enabling the open access transformation of those journals without additional administrative effort or cost. Booksellers continue to organise journal purchases for their customers in the usual way,” De Gruyter says.

“In addition, unlike the APC model [Article Processing Charge, whereby readers pay a fee upfront to fund the open access] which is widely established in the sciences, Subscribe to Open is suited to transforming all journal types in all disciplines, including in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). For De Gruyter’s journal portfolio, which is strongly focused on the humanities, Subscribe to Open is therefore a logical choice to function as the main way to open journals,” it continues.

“Researchers and readers all over the world benefit from the fact that content from journals becomes freely available via S2O. Usage of De Gruyter’s journal Linguistics, for example, which was transformed via S2O in 2022, has increased sevenfold over the previous year, and the number of countries from which content is accessed has grown massively.”

Carsten Buhr, managing director of De Gruyter, said: “More than other established models, Subscribe to Open represents a fair, sustainable and egalitarian path toward open access – not just for our humanities journals. We are proud to be the first major academic publisher to take this route and to contribute to the important task of opening scholarly content.”

De Gruyter is an active participant in the Subscribe to Open Community of Practice, which works to establish S2O as a sustainable path to open access. More information can be found here.