Taylor & Francis announces pilot

Taylor & Francis has announced its first Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot, one of several options it is trialing to accelerate open access (OA) publishing. S2O enables a journal’s subscribers to support its conversion to OA, making new articles available to readers everywhere, added the publisher.

Taylor & Francis says it is inviting existing subscribers of the participating journals to renew their subscriptions for next year by March. If enough institutions support S2O in this way, all articles published in the 2025 volume will be open access. This process can then be repeated, one volume at a time, for the following years. If the required level of support is not achieved for any of the pilot titles, they will remain as subscription journals (with a hybrid OA option).

Taylor & Francis says S2O introduces an additional equitable route for making trusted knowledge available to all. Under S2O’s collective funding model OA publishing costs are covered by subscribers, which means there are no article publishing charges for authors. According to the publisher, this makes it a promising solution for journals in fields where researchers are less likely to have access to OA funding, such as Humanities and Social Sciences, and for authors based in low-income regions.

Emily Farrell, global commercial director for Open Research at Taylor & Francis, said: “As one of the first of the large publishers to trial an S2O model, we are excited to see how this pilot develops. We are very grateful to those partners who have already indicated that they will support this new model, and hope to see growing support for this collective approach to providing open access pathways.”

This pilot aims to pave a path to open for three journals: Technical Services Quarterly, Legal Reference Services Quarterly and LGBT Issues in Counseling.

Taylor & Francis is one of the world’s largest OA publishers, with a record of exploring open research options. Recent examples include Pledge to Open, Taylor & Francis’ collaborative funding initiative for OA books; Critical Insights, an OA journal series for impactful research on contemporary challenges; and VeriXiv, a new verified preprint platform launched by F1000 with the Gates Foundation.

Alex Robinson, chief commercial officer at Taylor & Francis, explained: “We believe that a diversity of models is required to support the move to an open future. Our ‘read and publish’ agreements have been very successful at increasing the number of articles published OA each year, helping authors at over 1,000 institutions around the world to choose open. However, that route alone will not work for every researcher, institution and journal. We are therefore committed to trialing a variety of new models which we hope can become additional long-term choices.”