A 360-Year Publishing Tradition Embraces Transformation
On 6 August 2025, the Royal Society announced that it had agreed plans to convert its eight subscription journals to full open access in 2026 through the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model. The decision, taken by the Society's Publishing Board in July 2025, represents one of the most significant commitments to the S2O model by a major learned society publisher.
The affected titles include Philosophical Transactions A and Philosophical Transactions B — the world's oldest continuously published scientific journals, first launched in 1665 — alongside Proceedings of the Royal Society A and B, Biology Letters, Interface and Interface Focus, and Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
"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."
— Rod Cookson, Royal Society Publishing Director
How Subscribe to Open Works
The S2O model, first pioneered by the non-profit publisher Annual Reviews in 2019, offers a radically different pathway to open access compared to the dominant Article Processing Charge (APC) model. The mechanism operates as follows:
- Libraries continue paying subscriptions at existing rates — no price increase is imposed.
- If sufficient libraries participate, the journal's entire output for that year is converted to open access.
- All content becomes free to read and publish — no APCs for authors, no paywalls for readers.
- If participation falls below the threshold, the journal reverts to subscription access for that year.
Eliminating the Double Bind
Under the current hybrid model at the Royal Society, authors who wish to make their articles open access must pay APCs — fees that can exceed £2,500 per article. Authors who cannot afford APCs see their work placed behind a paywall, limiting readership particularly in institutions without subscription budgets.
The S2O transition would eliminate this binary. As Professor Sir Mark Walport FRS, Vice President and Chair of the Royal Society's Publishing Board, explained:
"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."
The Broader Open Access Landscape
The Royal Society's decision comes at a pivotal moment for scholarly publishing reform:
| Development | Date | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| OSTP Gold Standard Science guidance | June 2025 | US federal agencies required to plan for transparent, reproducible research |
| NIH zero-embargo public access policy | July 2025 | Eliminated 12-month embargo for NIH-funded manuscripts |
| Royal Society S2O announcement | August 2025 | Eight journals to go fee-free in 2026 |
| Nature transparent peer review expansion | June 2025 | All new research papers to include referee reports |
International Dimensions
The S2O announcement builds on earlier international partnerships. In 2025, the Royal Society agreed a Read and Publish deal with Brazil's Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), allowing Brazilian authors affiliated with CAPES-supported institutions to publish in Royal Society journals without APCs.
This agreement illustrates the growing recognition that open access transitions must accommodate the global research community, not just well-funded institutions in the Global North. The S2O model, by its design, extends this principle: once a journal converts, any author worldwide can publish without charge, and any reader worldwide can access the content without a subscription.
Sustainability Questions
The S2O model is not without risks. Its central mechanism — converting to open access only if sufficient libraries maintain subscriptions — creates an inherent uncertainty. If libraries, seeing that content will be free regardless, cancel their subscriptions (a phenomenon known as free-riding), the model collapses.
The Royal Society has acknowledged this challenge. It plans to "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." This dual-track approach — S2O as an accelerant, Read and Publish agreements as the long-term anchor — suggests the Society views S2O as a transitional rather than permanent mechanism.
A Tradition of Innovation
The Royal Society's decision to adopt S2O is, in a sense, a return to its founding principles. When Henry Oldenburg launched Philosophical Transactions in 1665, the journal's purpose was to disseminate scientific knowledge as widely as the printing press and postal networks of the era allowed. Three hundred and sixty years later, the Society is leveraging a different financial mechanism to achieve the same fundamental goal — making scientific knowledge available to all who seek it.
Sources:
- Royal Society, "Royal Society sets out plan to move journals to full open access in 2026 through Subscribe to Open," 6 August 2025
- Royal Society Publishing, Subscribe to Open information page
- Council of Science, Open Science Round-Up, June 2025
- Annual Reviews, Subscribe to Open model documentation
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Institutional Research Desk · Foresight Institute of Research and Translation
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