Announcements

Subscribe-to-Open Community of Practice
Statement on the OSTP ‘Nelson Memo’

(September 14, 2022) The Subscribe to Open (S2O) Community of Practice is an informal collective of over forty pro-open publishers, libraries, consortia, funders, service providers, and other stakeholders committed to providing equitable and economically sustainable OA publishing. The S2O Community of Practice welcomes the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research.

Achieving OSTP’s objectives will require multiple economic models, not just those that rely on article processing charges. Subscribe to Open is capable of opening a vast corpus of research output across all disciplines, including the social sciences and humanities, from society, nonprofit, university, and commercial publishers.

Subscribe to Open uses established market processes and accepted incentive structures to coordinate support for all types of open scholarship, including journals and monographs. S2O motivates subscribers to participate by making OA contingent on their ongoing support, in combination with exclusive incentives that make participation in their economic self-interest. The model distributes open access support costs broadly and equitably by converting subscriptions into stable, cost-neutral sources of open support.

The members of the S2O community are eager to engage with US federal funding agencies to identify policies that encourage varied, robust, and equitable economic models for disseminating open research.