Librarians engaged with funding Open Access (OA) publishing, particularly the conversation of paid scholarly journals to OA, have been hearing a lot lately about the benefits of an emerging model first pioneered by Annual Reviews: Subscribe-to-Open (S20). As explained on the Annual Reviews website:

“S2O is a business model that uses subscription payments to convert gated access journals to full open access (OA). Under S2O, institutional customers continue to subscribe to the journals that their patrons value. If support is sufficient, new volumes are published OA under a Creative Commons license; if support is insufficient, the paywall is retained. Thus, S2O is a subscription model, not a voluntary donation approach. It offers a partnership for rapid and equitable conversion to OA for readers and authors in all disciplines.”

In other words, S20 uses existing renewals and new subscriptions of covered titles to generate OA operational funds for a designated period of time (usually three years). When S20 campaigns are successful, libraries and researchers worldwide have access to the journal content being flipped and authors of those journals face no Author Processing Charges (APCs).

Knowledge Unlatched has been on the S20 front since 2019 when it introduced to libraries worldwide the Berghahn Open Anthro package of 13 journals in anthropology being flipped to OA. Last year, KU added two more S20 offerings to its portfolio: Pluto Open Journals ( 21 journals in radical politics) and IWAP Journals (10 journals in water treatment and science). This year, KU is partnering with the renowned mathematics publisher EDP Sciences to make OA a package of six flagship journals in mathematics.

These four OA initiatives over the past two years have shown that the S20 approach is gaining momentum and that libraries are responding positively to the idea of renewing and upgrading their journal subscriptions for the benefit of making more journal content being published OA.

This webinar, to be held on September 22, is geared toward European libraries and will explore in detail the ins and outs of the S20 model in the context of these four initiatives—drawing special attention to KU's newest partnership with EDP Sciences and the Open Mathematics 2022-2024 package—so that libraries across Europe have a thorough understanding of the various benefits of participating, not only for their own institutions but for the benefit of global research.

• Please follow this link to register for the webinar