Astronomy & Astrophysics
Subscribe to Open program
2022 Transparency Report
Anne Ruimy, Senior Publisher, EDP Sciences
Agnès Henri, Managing Director, EDP Sciences
November 2022

A&A Subscribe to Open
program2022 Transparency Report
November 2022

Contents
Introduction

3

Financial structure of A&A

5

Subscriptions

7

Article Processing Charges

10

Open access publication prior to the OA transition

10

Publication statistics

11

Breakdown of publication costs

12

Financial impact of S2O for the publisher

12

Conclusion

13

This is an Open Access document distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

3

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Report

Introduction
Subscribe to Open
Subscribe to Open (S2O) is an alternative, transformative model that aims totransition subscription journals to open access (OA) using subscription revenue tocover open access publication costs. First introduced by Annual Reviews, S2O has
been embraced by a number of publishers who have come together in the S2O
Community of Practice. This innovative model builds on historical collaborative
initiatives such as SCOAP3 and Knowledge Unlatched, and has quickly become an
accepted approach for achieving open access in different communities.
A journal publishing under a Subscribe to Open model will publish its content
in open access if sufficient subscriptions are renewed. If subscription renewal
targets are not met, the content remains or reverts to being accessible tosubscribers only.
We are very pleased to share this first Transparency Report of Astronomy &Astrophysics’ Subscribe to Open initiative. The A&A S2O model is a bit more
complex than for other journals published by EDP Sciences. This is due to thecomplex financial structure of A&A. For more information on A&A’s S2O model,
see also the FAQs.

Background: A&A and open access
Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) is an international consortium governed by a
Board of Directors made of researchers from 27 countries, mainly European. The
Board sets the policies for A&A including general guidelines for publishing, theselection of the Editors, the various financial aspects, as well as membership of
new countries. The journal has been published by EDP Sciences, an international
publisher based in France, for over 20 years.
A&A has been for many years a “green” open access journal. As is the traditionin astronomy, A&A encourages authors to self-archive different versions of
the article in arXiv under a non-exclusive license. A&A and EDP Sciences allow
authors to self-archive even the final PDF file of the article exactly as published in
the journal and without any period of embargo.
Notwithstanding the tradition of green OA in astronomy and the generous
green OA policy applied by A&A and EDP Sciences, we felt that it is important
to go further and study ways to transition the journal to full open access, in thegeneral context of an evolution of publication models towards full open access.
Publishers involved in transformative agreements also have a commitment
towards the consortia involved in such agreements to transition the journals
included in these agreements to full open access within a few years (see below,
transformative agreements). Finally, the regular increase in paid open access by
individual authors (see below, evolution of APCs) highlights the growing need of
authors or their funders for full OA publication.
In 2019, A&A and EDP Sciences put together a working group to study how A&A
could evolve towards full open access. This group, including members of EDP
Sciences and of the A&A executive committee, as well as a head librarian in
astronomy, met regularly to study several options to transition the journal to4

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Reportfull open access. A consensus formed in 2021 that the Subscribe to Open model
would fit A&A’s needs. This follows the rise of this type of collaborative model:
by 2022, 17 publishers have adopted this model, publishing 96 S2O journals in
2022, according to a census by the S2O community of practice. EDP Sciences also
had the experience of being one of the early adopters of S2O, and of successfullytransitioning 6 mathematics journals to open access following this model.
In September 2021, A&A announced that it would publish under a S2O model in
2022. This announcement was made within weeks of the American Astronomical
Society announcing that it would flip its journals to Gold Open Access. Thus, threecore research journals in astronomy (A&A, Astrophysical Journal, Astronomical
Journal) independently announced their transition to open access in 2022.
The new S2O publication model for A&A was communicated to subscribers
and agencies in September 2021, and the 2022 subscription renewal campaign
proceeded. The renewal campaign was regularly evaluated. The decision was
finally made on the 4th of April 2022 by A&A and EDP sciences to publish thejournal in open access in 2022 (see press release).

The A&A S2O model
Under the S2O model, as long as subscriptions are renewed, the content ispublished open access. In practice, for A&A, articles newly accepted fromthe time of the decision to transition to OA are published open access undera CC-BY 4.0 license. The date of the transition is the 4th of April 2022. Articles
accepted on or after the 4th of April are thus published in open access. Articles
accepted before this date are published in free access, that is, freely accessible toall, but not under CC-BY license.
OA implementation for newly accepted content is managed via the publication
forms filled by authors when their articles are accepted. Authors of articles
accepted before the 4th of April were asked to sign a copyright transfer form1.
Authors of articles accepted or on after the 4th of April 2022 are asked to sign alicense agreement for the publication of their article in open access.
There is a shift between the S2O cycle and the publication year running fromJanuary to December. In addition, there is a time lag between the transition to
open access publication and the first articles effectively published in open access,as articles accepted before and after the transition go through the production
process. Finally, the time between article acceptance and online publication canvary from article to article, due to variations in post-acceptance processes (e.g.
language editing) and production processes (production time, time for authors tocheck their proofs...). For these reasons, there was a mixture of free access andopen access articles appearing in A&A issues for some time throughout 2022.
Regarding the older archives: until 2022, A&A operated a 1-year “moving wallembargo”. All articles published in the Journal became freely accessible 12months after publication. At the time of the transition to OA in April 2022, wereleased all content still under embargo in free access (free to read, no CC-BY
license).

1 Articles not open access are copyrighted to ESO, the European Southern Observatory. Articles
published OA under transformative agreements, or articles for which authors pay an Article
Processing Charge (APC) for OA publication, are always published in open access.

5

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Report

In future years, subscription renewals will continue to be evaluated year on
year to decide whether open access publication can continue. If sufficient
subscriptions are renewed, there will be no discontinuity in open accesspublication. If insufficient subscriptions are renewed, the decision will be made tostop open access publication. Articles accepted after this time will be published ingated access.
FAQs are available online and regularly updated to provide users withinformation on the A&A S2O model.

Financial structure of A&A● Editorial costs. A&A is a community journal which is sponsored by member

countries. Authors from member countries do not pay any charges to publish
in the journal. Authors from non-member countries pay a modest page
charge2. Page charges and contributions from member countries are used tofund the editorial costs of the journal. Page charges and member contributions
are collected by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on behalf of A&A
with no intervention by the publisher.
● Publishing costs. For over 20 years and following successive tender processes,

A&A and EDP Sciences have had a strong partnership and worked together
for the success of the journal. The publishing costs for EDP Sciences topublish the journal are primarily funded by subscriptions (including fees fromtransformative agreements). Prior to the transition to open access, this wascomplemented by an additional revenue stream: Article Processing Charges(APCs) paid by authors who wished to publish their articles in open access.
Subscriptions and APCs are collected by the Publisher, EDP Sciences, who also
pay a royalty to A&A. Following the transition to open access under the S2O
model in 2022, APCs were discontinued, and this revenue stream ceased forthe publisher. EDP Sciences has always been keen to avoid “double-dipping,”by negotiating transformative agreements combining read and publish accesswith institutions and consortia having a strong involvement in the journal. The
transition to the S2O model and complete removal of APCs is another step inthis direction.
Although the financial streams related to “editorial” and “publishing” activities areclearly distinct, there is a relationship between the two, in that page charges in
A&A help to spread the costs of running a journal and keep subscription prices
down. This strategy has always kept our subscription price considerably lower
than the competitor journals.

2 Page Charge: Page charges is a set price per published page incurred by authors and in the caseof A&A are used to subsidise editorial costs and keep the subscription price low.
Article Processing Charge (APC): An APC is a fee charged to make an article open access on
publication. The content is published under a Creative Commons (CC) license, and the APC ispayable by the author, institution, or funding body.

6

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Report

Figure 1. Main sources of revenue and costs for the publication of A&A, following
the transition to open access under the S2O model. “Library subscriptions underS2O model” includes transformative agreement, see Table 2.

A&A’s Subscribe to Open Model

Revenue collected by A&A• A&A member contributions• Page charges for non A&A
members

Revenue collected by EDPS
Royalties

Library subscriptions underS2O model

Editorial costs

Publishing costs• Editorial office• Language editing• Editor fees
• Educational initiatives• Submission system• Publication platform• Production office• Copy-editing, typesetting• Marketing
OA Publication

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is an alternative subscription model which enables
libraries to use their budgets to support open access publishing, using existing
subscription workflows and channels. If sufficient subscriptions are renewed,
the content is published in open access. A&A’s version of the S2O model in 2022
is based on retaining the above financial structure as is. Editorial costs continue
to be funded by A&A member contributions and page charges. Subscriptions
continue to cover the publication costs of the journal in open access, and APCs
are discontinued.
Although there are no APCs to publish open access in A&A following thetransition to OA, page charges remain in place for authors from non-member
countries. Nevertheless, fair and equitable access to publishing in A&A is a corevalue of the journal. In October 2022, A&A formalized a waiver policy for authors
based in disadvantaged countries. Page charges are now waived if the firstauthor is affiliated with one of the countries in Group A of Research4Life.
This first Transparency Report provides indicators concerning the revenue
and costs of the publisher. Due to the change in the chair of the Board of
Directors of A&A in 2022, details concerning the revenue and editorial costsof A&A could not be provided on time for the publication of this report. A
more detailed report will follow in 2023.

7

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Report

Subscriptions
Evolution of subscription price
Table 1. Evolution of A&A single-site institutional subscription prices since 2018.
Multi-site subscription prices and transformative agreements are discussed
between EDPS and the relevant customers on a case-by-case basis.
Year

Subscription
price (€)

Year to Year increase (%)

2018

3215

2019

3215

0%

2020

3215

0%

2021

3215

0%

2022

3315

3%

Yearly subscription price increases for A&A are decided in consultation between
the board of A&A and the Publisher. Increases have historically been very
moderate. A&A subscription prices did not increase for several years. In 2021 inparticular, EDP Sciences froze subscription prices for all journals in the context of
the COVID pandemic (see press release).
In 2022, we decided on a price increase of 3% for A&A. This is the firstsubscription price increase in several years. A regular increase in the subscription
price is necessary to compensate for inflation, and to cover increasing publication
costs due to the increasing number of articles published year on year, and theincreasing number of pages of each article (see Table 3). Part of the publication
costs are directly proportional to the number of pages published.

2022 subscription renewal campaign
In September 2021, A&A decided that it would publish under the S2O modelfrom 2022. The decision was communicated to agencies and subscribers. At thistime, A&A was announced as being published under a S2O model, but that it would
only be published in open access in the following subscription year if and whensufficient subscriptions were renewed.
We evaluated the subscription renewals compared on a bi-weekly basis startingin December 2021, see Figure 2. Subscription renewals were compared to thereference year 2021. The renewal rate only reached around 88% by the end of
February 2022 compared to the full 2021 year. This was disappointing consideringthat 2021 was a year already affected by COVID-related budget cuts. This may
indicate that a proportion of subscribers decided to adopt a “wait-and-see”
approach.
We postponed the decision by a further 4 weeks. The decision to flip to open
access was made on the 25th of March, with 91.5% subscriptions renewed
on 25/03. Although this fell short of the 100% renewal target, we decided
nevertheless to go ahead and attempt the OA flip for a first pilot year. This will be
reviewed in 2023.

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Report

Figure 2. Number of subscriptions renewed throughout the 2022 subscription
renewal period (% of total of 2021 subscriptions). NB: this includes only
“traditional” subscriptions and Max Planck institutes, at the exception of
institutes covered by the French national agreement (see the section below ontransformative agreements).
Percentage subscription renewals 2022 vs. full year 2021

Nb subscriptions

100%
95%
90%
85%
80%
75%
70%
65%
02
2
/2

3/

23

20
22
16
/

02
2

3/

9/
2

3/

20
22
2/

3/

02
2
/2

23
2/

20
22
16
/

02
2

2/

9/
2

2/

20
22
2/

2/

20
22

02
2

1/
26
/

1/
19
/2

20
22

1/
12
/

/2

02
2

60%
1/
5

8

Any subscription renewed after the 25th of March continues to be processed
even though the decision to flip to open access in 2022 has already been made.
We count on the support of libraries to continue to subscribe to S2O journals. All
subscriptions contribute to the financial sustainability of the model, and to thedecision to continue or adapt the S2O model in 2023.

Transformative open access agreements
EDP Sciences has negotiated a number of transformative open access agreements
over the past years. The transformative agreements covering A&A are the following.
● National open access agreement in France. In 2017, a multi-year open

access agreement was reached in France, running from 2017 to 2021 inclusive.
French institutes opting in the agreement have access to the content, and theircorresponding authors can publish open access in EDP Sciences journals. A&A
is among the journals covered in this agreement. The agreement covers French
institutes and organizations including the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique) and CEA (Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies
alternatives). This agreement has been renewed for the period 2022-2026.
● Max Planck open access agreement. At the end of 2018, an open accessagreement was reached with the Max Planck Society in Germany. This is a pilot
program for A&A only. The original agreement ran for a 2-year period from 20192020. It was renewed in 2020 and 2021 for additional periods of 1 year, under
the same terms. This agreement allows access to the content and corresponding
authors from Max Planck institutes can publish open access in A&A.
● TU Delft agreement. A more limited agreement was reached with TU Delft in

2021, covering the period 2022-2024. This allows access to maths journals andA&A, and corresponding authors from TU Delft can publish a limited numberof articles open access in any EDPS journal.
The parties of these agreements were very supportive of the evolution of A&A
towards full open access under the S2O model and agreed to extend the agreementin 2022 under the same terms as previous years.

9

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Report

Subscription types
The below figures provide more information on the type of subscription.
Figure 3. A. Number of subscriptions per subscription type, for the full year 2021
Multi-site or large sites
subscriptions including
Max Planck 10%

Individual
subscriptions
1%

Frenchnational
agreement
14%

Single site
institutional
subscriptions
75%

The largest number of institutions subscribing to A&A are subscribing via singlesite institutional subscriptions (75%). This is followed by multi-site institutionalor large site subscription, including Max Plank Institutes who are part of the
Max Planck open access agreement. Also included are institutions subscribing
to EDP Sciences’ full collection of journals. A small proportion of individuals (1%)
subscribe to A&A.
Figure 3. B. Number of institutes covered per subscription type, for the full year
2021.
Multi-site or large sites
subscriptions including
Max Planck 32%

Frenchnational
agreement
10%

Individual
subscriptions
1%

Single site
institutional
subscriptions
57%

Multi-site or large site subscriptions can cover a varying number of institutes.
Figure 3.B. represents the number of institutions covered. Under the French National
Licence, each institution (e.g. each university) is considered a separate subscriber.

10

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Report

The agreement with the Max Planck Society is considered a “multi-site agreement”,
the subscription covering several Max Planck Institutes throughout Germany.

Article Processing Charges
Until the transition to open access under the S2O model in April 2022, A&A was a“hybrid journal”, meaning that most of the content was accessible to subscribers
only, but authors could opt to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) to publish
their article in full, immediate open access and thus make it freely accessible toall. The evolution of APC rates for A&A since 2018 is presented in the Table below.
Table 2. Evolution of Article Processing Charges for open access publication in
A&A since 2018.
Year

APC rate (€)

2018

700

2019

1500

2020

1500

2021

1500

2022

1500

The APC rate increased in 2019 to better reflect production costs. APC rateincreases are decided in consultation between the board of A&A and the
Publisher. The evolution of APCs has remained stable over the period 2019-2022,
at €1500 per article. APCs are discontinued for newly accepted articles as of April
2022 with the flip of the journal to open access under the S2O model. With theflip of the journal to open access under the S2O model, the potential of “doubledipping” has been entirely removed.

Open access publication prior to the OA transition
The Figure below represents the evolution of the total number of articles
published OA in A&A since 2018. This includes articles published OA undertransformative agreements, and articles for which authors paid an APC to publish
their article open access.
Figure 4. Evolution of OA articles published between 2018-2021.
Max Planck agreement

French national agreement

APCs paid by authors

600
500
400
300
200
100
0

2018

2019

2020

2021

There was almost a doubling of the total number of OA articles publishedbetween 2018 and 2021, from 300 to 559.

11

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Report

The number of articles published open access under transformative agreements
increased over the years as new agreements were negotiated: the French
agreement was signed at the end of 2017, the Max Planck agreement was signed
at the end of 2018. The number of articles published within each agreement
is relatively stable from year to year. EDP Sciences has put together a solid
workflow to detect and check the main affiliation of the corresponding authors
eligible for transformative agreements.
The number of APCs has increased steadily year on year, with a particularly highnumber in 2021 probably reflecting increasing funder mandates (and financial
support) for open access publication. In 2021, the total number of articles
published open access represented 26% of the total articles published. APC
revenue for the Publisher will cease for articles accepted from April 2022.

Publication statistics
Table 3. Evolution of the number of articles and pages published since 2018.
Calculated metrics: average number of pages/article, and average subscription
price/article.
Year

Numberof articles
published

Numberof pages
published

Averagenumber ofpages/article

Averagesubscription
price/article(€/article)

2018

1919

27456

14.3

1.67

2019

2045

29891

14.6

1.57

2020

2153

31794

14.8

1.49

2021

2143

33150

15.5

1.50

The number of articles and pages published every year have increased steadily
between 2018 and 2021. The average size of articles (number of pages/article)
has also slowly increased year on year. Articles published in 2021 were more thana page longer than articles published in 2018 (from 14.2 to 15.5 pages/article in2021). The increase in the number of published articles and the average size ofarticles generate increasing publication costs for the publisher.
A derived metric, the average subscription price per article, is presented in Table 2
above (last column). The subscription price per article is a relatively common metric,see for example the database created by Bergstrom and McAfee which allows tocompare price per article and price per citation for journals in various disciplines.
For physics journals included in the database until 2013, mean price per article
was around 28.39 $/article, and median price per article was $15.32 /article. The
database doesn’t have a separate “astronomy” category. The subscription price per
article for A&A is an order of magnitude lower, at around 1.5€/article. This is madepossible in part by the fact that subscription revenue only covers publication costs,
while editorial costs are covered by contributions from A&A member countries, andpage charges for non-A&A member countries (see Figure 1). A&A and EDP Sciences
have also been keen to limit subscription price increases over the years.
The fact that subscription prices did not increase between 2018-2021 has meant anerosion of subscription revenue for the Publisher. This was partly compensated byan increase in article processing charges (APCs) paid by authors who chose the open
access option to publish their article in A&A, prior to the OA transition in 2022.

12

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Report

Breakdown of publication costs
The revenue collected by the Publisher includes subscriptions (includingtransformative agreements), and APCs until April 2022. These funds are used tocover the following costs. Financial data is for 2019.
Figure 5. Distribution of publication costs in 2019.
Production
editors 16%
Royalties
to A&A
27%
Typesetting
14%

Sales 6%
Overheads 22%
Other (Editor, Management) 4%

Marketing 6%
IT & Web platform 5%

The publication of A&A by EDP Sciences is at financial equilibrium. Any financial
margin by the Publisher is invested into improvements, particularly of the IT
platforms. More precisely, EDP Sciences uses proprietary editorial and hosting
systems, which are highly customized for A&A.

Financial impact of S2O for the publisher
The Publisher’s revenue will decrease significantly in 2022 following theimplementation of OA publication under the S2O model. This is primarily due tothe discontinuation of the open access option after April 2022, which means that
there will be no APC revenue after that date. The number of APCs collected had
increased significantly before then, which contributed to limit subscription priceincreases while the volume of articles published grew (see Table 3). Removing thissource of revenue represents a significant financial commitment made by the
Publisher towards the open access transition of A&A.
The elimination of APCs is expected by libraries who are more and more criticalof publishers’ “double-dipping” (the cumulation of subscription revenue and APCs
originating from the same institutions). This has led to the rise in “transformative
agreements” combining access to the content and unrestricted open accesspublication in the journals included in these agreements. This evolution is meant
to be cost neutral for libraries, the price paid by libraries being calculated either
on the basis of the subscription price (“read and publish” deal) or the APCs paidby the institution (“publish and read” deal). Transformative agreements aredemanded by libraries and consortia to keep costs down and avoid “doubledipping”. CoalitionS supports transformative agreements as a transition step tofull open access transformation. Such agreements have been criticized for being

13

A & A Subscribe to Open program – 2022 Transparency Reportcomplex to negotiate, particularly for small structures with a low number of APCs
invoiced. It is also unclear how the transition from transformative agreements(one-to-one deals) to full open access can take place (see e.g. this report)..
The main open access partners of EDP Sciences for A&A, the French consortium
and Max Planck Digital Library, have supported the OA transition of EDP
Sciences journals for many years with transformative agreements. They haveagreed to continue to subscribe and support the open access transition undera S2O model at a similar financial level than previously. The French national
agreement has been renewed until 2026, ensuring a stable and significant
source of funding for the S2O model of A&A.
For EDP Sciences, the financial impact of the elimination of APCs under S2O
open access publication is known and significant. The unknown risk to thecontinuation of open access publication comes primarily from the evolutionof “traditional” subscriptions. These subscriptions are renewed every year,
and a proportion of subscribers may adopt a “free-riding” approach with the
expectation that the content will continue to be freely accessible. We foreseethat the risk could be higher in Year 2 of the open access transition, when
the previous year’s content will already be open access, and usage reports tolibraries will not capture the full usage of open access content by subscribing
institution. OA publication with a CC-BY license means that articles can berepublished on other sites. In addition, researchers can access A&A content
without going through their institutional portal. This means that measured
usage of individual institutions will not be as representative of the real usageof their researchers. Usage reports are an important part of the decision oflibraries to renew their subscription.
In 2022, many libraries around the world, and the partners with whom we haveworked on the transformation of the journal to open access for several years, haveshown enthusiasm and support for the S2O model. We are continuing to explore
possible adaptations of the S2O model in 2023 to provide further incentives tosubscribe in order to keep publishing in open access in years to come.

Conclusion
Despite the challenges brought about by the tradition of “green” open access inastronomy, and the complex financial structure of A&A, the Board of A&A and EDP
Sciences have successfully transitioned the journal to open access in 2022 undera Subscribe to Open model. A&A was the first astronomy journal in the world totransition to open access under the S2O model. Continued open access publicationin 2023 will depend on the continued support of libraries. Together, EDP Sciences
and A&A are committed to keep reviewing and adapting the A&A Subscribe toOpen model to respond and adapt to the demands of the librarian community.
Transparency in financial information is an expectation of the librariancommunity, particularly those institutions supporting collaborative open
access publishing models. This first Transparency Report provides indicatorsconcerning the revenue and costs of the publisher only. A more detailed reportwill follow in 2023.