EMS Press publishes all journals open access in 2024, with a blend of S2O and Diamond models.

EMS Press is delighted to announce that all 22 journals in its Subscribe To Open (S2O) programme will be published as open access for the 2024 subscription period. This means that for the first time the Press’s annual journal output will be entirely open access, with a blend of S2O and Diamond publications. 

The following journals have met the Press’s criteria for sustainable publication and will publish all 2024 issues open access under a CC-BY licence: 

• Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré C
• Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré D
• Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici
• Elemente der Mathematik
• EMS Surveys in Mathematical Sciences
• Groups, Geometry, and Dynamics
• Interfaces and Free Boundaries
• Journal of Combinatorial Algebra
• Journal of Fractal Geometry
• Journal of Noncommutative Geometry
• Journal of Spectral Theory
• Journal of the European Mathematical Society
• L’Enseignement Mathématique
• Mathematical Statistics and Learning
• Memoirs of the European Mathematical Society
• Portugaliae Mathematica
• Publications of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences
• Quantum Topology
• Rendiconti del Seminario Matematico della Università di Padova
• Rendiconti Lincei – Matematica e Applicazioni
• Revista Matemática Iberoamericana
• Zeitschrift für Analysis und ihre Anwendungen

André Gaul, CEO, comments “to be able to transform the publishing house from a traditional subscription journals business to a fully open access one in under 5 years is a tremendous success for the whole team, and a real win for the wider mathematical community. Year after year we see strong support from our subscriber base for this approach, and as the significant drawbacks of article processing charges [APCs] are brought to the fore, we are confident in our approach to deliver a fair and equitable future for open access mathematics.”

EMS Press once again utilised its unique “solidarity model” which distributes shared package revenues to support titles with lower incomes, thus allowing them to achieve their sustainability thresholds. The team will then work to make these titles independently sustainable in future years. The model has been updated for the 2024 calculation to allow flexible packages – a revised version can be accessed here. 

Details of the 2025 S2O round will be announced later this year. In the meantime we ​​encourage libraries, consortia, funders and other national groups to get in touch if they would like to hear more about how they can proactively support the S2O initiative.

Download a PDF of this announcement.

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library, which is the German national library for science and technology, have signed a new open access ‘Platinum model’ agreement. The four-year deal provides unlimited RSC publishing services – including submission, peer-review, hosting, indexing and promotion – to authors and readers at 77 German research institutions without charge.

All academic and research institutions can participate in this new consortium model, including those that do not publish. Furthermore, under a renewal of the agreement that will begin in 2028, all content will be fully open access (OA) and authors from participating institutions can publish without author charges.

The fact that 77 institutions have signed on to this new RSC Platinum consortium model means that the vast majority of the publications in RSC journals from German institutions will be OA. This represents a significant upgrade over the RSC’s previous Read & Publish consortium with TIB, which covered just 31 German institutions and approximately 45% of research articles from Germany.

‘We hope that the success of this collaborative model in Germany will serve as a template by which we can develop similar models in other countries to ensure the costs of publication in an OA world are distributed across relevant stakeholders and not the sole responsibility of research-intensive institutions – or individual authors,’ stated Sara Bosshart, the RSC’s head of open access.

Irina Sens, TIB’s deputy director and head of library operations, said that over the next four years the new agreement will help all parties to transition from ‘the current hybrid model’ to a fully OA model. ‘With the entire portfolio covered for the first time, this deal also allows authors to choose their RSC publication venue irrespective of financial considerations,’ she added.

The Company of Biologists is delighted to announce the renewal of our Read & Publish Open Access agreement with the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL).

The agreement will run from 1 January 2024 until 31 December 2026, and corresponding authors at Max Planck Society’s 86 institutes can continue to publish research articles immediately Open Access (OA) in our hybrid journals (Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology) and our fully Open Access journals (Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open) without paying an article processing charge (APC). Researchers at participating institutions also benefit from unlimited access to our hybrid journals, including their full archives dating back to 1853.

Ádám Dér, Head of the Scientific Information Provision at MPDL, says:

Rich Blount, Regional Sales Manager at The Company of Biologists, says:

Claire Moulton, Publisher at The Company of Biologists, says:

Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers and a global leader in research and learning, today announced a new 5-year open access agreement with the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries at Vanderbilt University, beginning on January 1, 2024.  

This transformative agreement will provide Vanderbilt University affiliates with access to Wiley’s complete journal portfolio and enable participating researchers to publish research in Wiley’s complete portfolio of nearly 2,000 hybrid and gold open access journals, including those published by Hindawi, starting January 1, 2024. 

“It’s a pleasure to partner with Vanderbilt University as we continue to support US institutions in making more research more widely available,” said Kathryn Sharples, Vice President, Open Research, Wiley.

“I’m delighted to announce this new agreement with Wiley, which will provide Vanderbilt scholars access to a wide range of peer-reviewed journals across multiple disciplines,” said University Librarian Jon Shaw. “The Heard Libraries believe firmly in removing barriers to research, advancing information equity, and encouraging collaborative scholarship, and this agreement helps us accomplish those goals.”

Wiley is committed to paving the way toward an open research future, having achieved open access partnerships with over 2,500 institutions around the world. Wiley established its first US open access arrangement in a pilot with Iowa State University in 2021 and now has more than 40 agreements, which touch approximately 400 institutions, across North America. 

First Taylor & Francis Transformative Agreement in Southeast Asia

Researchers at Mahidol University in Thailand will be supported to publish open access (OA) journal articles through a new ‘read & publish’ partnership with Taylor & Francis. The three-year deal is Taylor & Francis’ first transformative agreement in Southeast Asia.

Corresponding authors at the leading Thai university can now choose to publish OA in over 2,000 Taylor & Francis Open Select (hybrid) journals, boosting the reach of their research. Mahidol faculty and students will also continue to have access to journals across a broad range of subjects.

The increase in OA outputs will support Mahidol University’s mission to excel in research for the benefit of humankind, by ensuring readers everywhere can access its world class work.

Asst. Prof. Nopphol Pausawasdi, Director of Mahidol University Library and Knowledge Center, said: “We are very pleased with this transformative agreement with Taylor & Francis, as it not only enables unrestricted access to Mahidol publications but it will also enrich our research and benefit the entire field.”

Ian Jones, VP and APAC Commercial Lead at Taylor & Francis, added: “We’re delighted that our first transformative agreement in Southeast Asia is with Mahidol University, an institution highly regarded for its research across health, sciences, arts and innovation. We look forward to working with them to maximize the impact of this open access partnership.”

Springer Nature has agreed a Transformative Agreement (TA) with the National Academic Network and Information Centre (TÜBITAK ULAKBIM). With over 2,400 open access (OA) articles published a year, it will be Turkey’s largest TA, significantly increasing scientific research and OA opportunities for the country’s researchers.

The three year agreement, effective as of January 2024, will enable approximately three million affiliated researchers from across 236 institutions to publish OA in Springer Nature’s 2000+ hybrid journals. As part of the agreement, researchers at these institutions will also have full access to subscription articles across the Springer, Palgrave, Adis,  Academic Journals and Nature journals portfolios. 

Speaking of the partnership, Asdaa Kotani, Vice President of Institutional Sales, Springer Nature commented:

“We are delighted to be partnering with TÜBITAK ULAKBIM in making Turkish research immediately available for researchers around the world to use and build on.  Turkish authors will also now benefit from the increased reach and usage of their work which comes from it being published OA – while being able to access research across a number of our portfolios. Springer Nature has been committed to OA for over 20 years. We were the first to publish one million articles OA and now support authors from over 3,600 institutions across six continents in publishing OA. This new agreement is an important demonstration of the flexibility and customer-first approach of our TAs and shows the important role they are playing in enabling the global OA transition.”

TAs are proven to be the most effective sustainable way to achieve OA growth and transition at scale. In the publisher’s latest OA report data showed that its TAs were delivering three times more OA articles in Springer hybrid titles, and enabling country level flips to OA where the publisher has a TA in place.

Mehmet Mirat Satoğlu, TÜBITAK ULAKBIM Director and board member said of the agreement:

“We have championed OA for a long time and this new agreement is a major step on that road, enabling a significant increase in OA publishing from Turkey. TÜBITAK is committed to supporting open science and OA globally, and as part of our efforts, the TÜBITAK Open Science Policy was adopted by the TÜBITAK Board of Directors in 2019. These steps help align the Turkish Research Area and the European Research Area, increasing the visibility and impact of our scientific publications. We hope this agreement will contribute to the global efforts towards achieving our common open science goals.”

More on the TA can be found here. More on the publisher’s commitment to OA and the impact of its portfolio can be found here and here.