CITATION: Dalmeet Singh Chawla. Could libraries band together to ensure open access for all?
Through the ‘subscribe to open’ model, libraries’ annual subscriptions ensure that paywalled journals become freely accessible, benefiting researchers and the public alike.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00710-2
Interesting initiative. Below are the opening three paragraphs. Ironically, the full text of the paper is behind a paywall!
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More than 70 journals are trialling a publishing model called subscribe to open (S2O), in which libraries pay an annual subscription fee to make paywalled journals open access.
The trial, set to start next January, will run for three years if there is enough participation. It aims to make academic journals freely available online without charging authors or relying on donations. Fifty-four societies, museums and research institutions around the world have signed their journals up.
The model guarantees that a journal’s content will be free to access for one year, as long as enough libraries commit to paying an annual subscription fee. If there aren’t enough subscriptions to the journal, all of its content remains paywalled. This process repeats annually, which means that ongoing access depends on yearly participation by libraries. It’s not permanent open access, says Lauren Kane, chief executive of BioOne, the non-profit organization in Washington DC that is leading the pilot. “It is a conditional open access.”
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HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org