The Royal Society has agreed plans that would make its journals fully open access in 2026 by adopting the ‘Subscribe to Open’ model.
Under plans agreed in July 2025, libraries subscribed to Royal Society journals will now be asked to support Subscribe to Open in 2026 through their subscriptions. If sufficient libraries continue their subscriptions, the journals will be converted to open access for the year.
The ambitious plan would make research papers published in its eight world-class subscription journals, including the world’s oldest peer-reviewed journals, Philosophical Transactions A and B, freely available online and remove fees for authors to publish in them.
Subscribe to Open is a cost-effective, high-impact and equitable way for publishers to transition to open access. The agreement works by allowing publishers to convert journals from subscriptions to open access, one year at a time.
This would mean the journals become free to read and publish in for any author or reader, not just those associated with a subscribed library.
Under the current hybrid model authors can choose to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) to make their article open access and available to read for free. With Subscribe to Open, these charges would disappear.
The Royal Society will repeat the offer in subsequent years while continuing to work with libraries, institutions and consortia to establish Read and Publish agreements which provide a sustainable model of open access in the longer term.
Earlier this year, the Society agreed a Read and Publish deal with Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES). This allows Brazilian authors affiliated with CAPES-supported institutions to publish in the Royal Society’s journals, including the two open access journals Royal Society Open Science and Open Biology, without APCs.
Rod Cookson, Royal Society Publishing Director, said:
“This is an exciting opportunity to move our journals to open access as early as next year. Subscribe to Open will help us transition more quickly and equitably, and is the right approach at this stage of our open access journey. Most importantly, it will make the Society’s journals stronger in the future, by reaching more readers and a wider range of researchers around the world.”
Professor Sir Mark Walport FRS, Vice President and Chair of the Royal Society’s Publishing Board,said:
“The Royal Society has a long history of transformative scientific publishing. This proposal is a natural next step which, along with the Society’s ongoing review on the Future of scientific publishing, continues the tradition of innovation it has brought to scholarly communication since launching the world’s first scientific journal in 1665.”
