Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for thenecessary large-scale transformation to open access
A Max Planck Digital Library Open Access Policy White Paper
Published:

28 April 2015

DOI:

http://dx.doi.org/10.17617/1.3

License:CC-BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Authors:

Ralf Schimmer¹, Kai Karin Geschuhn¹, Andreas Vogler¹

Contact:

schimmer@mpdl.mpg.de¹ Max Planck Digital Library, Amalienstraße 33, 80799 München, Germany

Abstract
This paper makes the strong, fact-based case for a large-scale transformation of the current
corpus of scientific subscription journals to an open access business model. The existing journals,
with their well-tested functionalities, should be retained and developed to meet the demands of
21st century research, while the underlying payment streams undergo a major restructuring.
There is sufficient momentum for this decisive push towards open access publishing. The diverse
existing initiatives must be coordinated so as to converge on this clear goal. The international
nature of research implies that this transformation will be achieved on a truly global scale only
through a consensus of the world’s most eminent research organizations. All the indications arethat the money already invested in the research publishing system is sufficient to enable atransformation that will be sustainable for the future. There needs to be a shared understandingthat the money currently locked in the journal subscription system must be withdrawn and repurposed for open access publishing services. The current library acquisition budgets are theultimate reservoir for enabling the transformation without financial or other risks. The goal is topreserve the established service levels provided by publishers that are still requested byresearchers, while redefining and reorganizing the necessary payment streams. By disrupting theunderlying business model, the viability of journal publishing can be preserved and put on a solid
footing for the scholarly developments of the future.

1. Introduction
The uptake of open access in recent years has been remarkable. Articles in open access are the mostdynamic growth area in scientific publishing and have reached a market share of 13% (without evencounting the hybrid component, which has also been growing rapidly as a result of British encouragement
following the Finch report). In just a few short years PLOS One has become the largest journal in the world,both in the number of papers it publishes and in the citations it is attracting.

Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model

It is a truism among publishers that new journals nowadays can be brought to market only if they are open
access; a new journal has no real future if it is placed on the subscription track. Though open access istaking its publication share away from the journals’ subscription element, this tendency is not mirrored by ashift of costs from subscriptions to open access fees. At present, the costs for open access publishing
services come as an add-on to a persisting subscription system that continues to extract annual priceincreases above inflation from the libraries of the world. It is not hard to predict that the acceleration ofopen access can be sustained only if the subscription budgets are opened up to be utilized for publication
services as well. Furthermore, the final breakthrough to a comprehensive open access publishing systemcannot be achieved unless library acquisition budgets are re-purposed so as to consolidate the system’s
two current streams into a single undertaking: to provide the best possible publishing services for thepatron researchers. This calls for the removal of the scarcities and restrictions that have been artificially
imposed by the toll-access system. Therefore the next and perhaps final round in the evolution to a 21st
century publication system must be the transformation of the existing subscription journals to a purely
open access model. This will be achieved by converting the existing library acquisition funds into a budget
for publication services, which can be expected to be eventually rather more stratified than article
processing charges (APCs) as we know them today.
The purpose of this paper is to assert the necessity of a large-scale transformation of the current
subscription journals to an open access business model and that this transformation can be achieved only
by an equally large-scale transformation or liberation of the library acquisition budgets. We show that themoney spent annually in the subscription system is already sufficient to accomplish this. The new
fundamentals would enable the publishing regime to arrive in the digital era, and would also support bothpublishers and librarians to re-define their roles and to develop their professional scope. After years ofwidespread anxiety and stress, the framework for a modern, realistic and sustainable system could finallybe realized through a large-scale transition to a congruous business model.

2. Important but limited initiatives
Since the start of the open access debate, various initiatives have brought changes to academic publishing,but they have all been limited in their scope and impact. Open access is making some progress, as seen in
the uptake of the ‘Gold’ approach and the emergence of the particular example of SCOAP3 as a model andinspiration. There is also increasing interest within the political sphere that reflects a push for better accessto publicly-funded research; and industry players have also been devising new approaches to open access.
Nevertheless, the current subscription system still prevails and is even in good shape, which indicates thechallenge of overcoming the inertia in an established system.
Seeing the rise of open accessIn the past decade there has been significant increase in ‘Gold’ open access, the arrangement whereby
researchers (or their institutions/funders) make advance payments of APCs to publish articles that are
freely accessible in scholarly journals online. This increase is reflected in the output in pure open accessjournals, which has been growing steadily by 1% of total publications year on year. The current level isaround 13% of total research papers, a surge that – interestingly – continues regardless of the presence orabsence of any policy and support structure at a given research institution.
The Sponsoring Consortium of Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3), hosted and organizedby CERN, has blazed the open access trail by converting some of the most prestigious journals in its field ofhigh-energy physics to open access. In modeling a switch of services and cash flows to open access mode,
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SCOAP3 has laid out an inspiring example to other research fields for the development of open accessaction plans of their own.
Political momentum is increasing
The open access approach is gaining increased political momentum. Various governments and national
research councils, in the European context particularly, have recently defined their very ambitious goals of
publishing between 50% and 80% – if not all – of their national research output as open access within thenext 5-10 years. Policies, budget provisions and administrative structures are being developed accordingly.
And on the supranational level, bodies such as the Global Research Council or Science Europe are also
pushing for more open access.
The ‘hybrid’ approach is an evolutionary step
Certain subscription journals have made an evolutionary step towards open access by offering some of
their articles on an open access basis. While this approach is reassuring for publishers, since they also
continue to receive subscription income, the article processing costs tend to be high.1 Furthermore, there isconcern about so-called double dipping, whereby an article is effectively paid for twice, through bothsubscription expenses and an APC, in a context in which publishers may not always be transparent about
proposed reductions in subscription price.2 Many commentators have pointed out that a hybrid-supporting
institution would – even with publishers’ proposed reductions – get only very marginal monetary refunds
for its investment.
‘Offsetting’ models take hybridity into a creative new space
In addition to an increasing uptake of the ‘hybrid’ model, which has added a substantial amount of
individual free-to-read articles in otherwise toll-access journals, we see the emergence of ‘hybrid 2.0’ in socalled offsetting models that redefine and extend the hybrid approach. As a result, perhaps, of the growingpressure from the influential European constituencies, several publishers have set up or are in negotiations
to devise ways to re-frame the services for contemporary scholarly communication while also reorganizing
the respective cash flows.
The rationale for offsetting models is that the defined open access services and their costs are (somewhat)
set off against subscription spending. Given that this approach also requires the establishment ofworkflows for the handling of article processing charges, the offsetting models could pave the way instructural, financial and organizational terms for further transitions. It could thus become a major catalyst
for manifesting the modern, digital services that have been envisioned for today’s scholarly
communication, along with becoming a vehicle for re-organizing the respective cash flows, too.
The offsetting approach was pioneered in the ‘Gold for Gold’ program by the Royal Society of Chemistry
and in an agreement between Austria and IOP Publishing in early 2014. Since then there has been a steadyflow of similar announcements, with the biggest push coming currently from the UK and the Netherlands.
The model as such, of course, is in the early days of its evolution, and it has yet to be applied beyond the
local or institutional level at an effective global scale. Nonetheless, offsetting is a progressed version of the
1

Bo-Christer Björk, David Salomon (2014): Developing an effective market for open access article processing charges.
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Spotlight-issues/Open-access/Guides/WTP054773.htm.
2David Prosser (2015): “The costs of double-dipping”. http://www.rluk.ac.uk/about-us/blog/the-costs-of-doubledipping/.
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Disrupting the subscription journals’ business modelhybrid model, and promises for the first time to be a truly ‘transitional’ model.3 It therefore induces anxiety
on the front line between advanced research libraries and conservative publishers because it has thepotential to be a platform for the total overhaul of the financing of academic publishing.
Pushing beyond the offsetting model
Important though each of these developments may be, their overall impact has been inadequate.
Offsetting can achieve only limited impact, and bold national initiatives such as those in the UK are
insufficiently decisive to change the journals’ underlying legal and financial structures. If we want toaccelerate open access we need an ambitious transition plan, along with direction and concerted actionthat includes further cooperation among non-traditional allies.
On the occasion of the 10th anniversary conference of the Berlin Declaration, then President of the Max
Planck Society, Peter Gruss, summarized the challenge by saying,“Instead of the black box of subscription price calculations, we need models based on actual
publication costs and characterized by transparency and sustainability. The money from existing
subscription budgets must be transferred to publication budgets from which the authors’
publications can then be financed via open access.”4
Innovation in the payment of publication costs cannot be fully expanded unless subscription costs are
simultaneously eliminated or systematically transformed. The libraries’ existing acquisition budgets must
therefore be the crucial fiscal reservoir for such a transformation. All that remains for the implementationof this clear philosophy is to be assured that there is sufficient money in the system for such a switch to befeasible.

3. Re-purposing the money currently invested
Discussions about the transition from the current subscription-based model to an APC-based open access‘Gold’ model have frequently raised anxieties about a presumed increase in costs. Libraries, in particular,very often fear that in the end they would need to pay more.
In most cases such perspectives arise from a lack of information about and analysis of the structure anddistribution of scientific journal publishing. Monitoring publication data at either an institutional or ageographic level and looking for insights is not yet a standard practice among libraries and otherinformation service providers, since the necessary data-handling skills and statistical proficiencies are notreadily available in these institutions. However, the expertise available at the Max Planck Digital Library
enables us to bring some foundational evidence to the debate.
We firmly believe that a large-scale transformation of the underlying business model of scientific journals is
possible at no financial risk. Our own data analysis shows that there is enough money already circulating in
the global market – money that is currently spent on scientific journals in the subscription system and that
could be redirected and re-invested into open access business models to pay for APCs. This paper

3

Stuart Shieber (2014): “A true transitional open-access business model”. The Occasional Pamphlet on scholarly
communication. https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2014/03/28/a-true-transitional-open-access-businessmodel/.
4Peter Gruss (2013): “The unstoppable rise of Open Access”. Max Planck Research 4/2013, p.7.
http://www.mpg.de/7644861/S002_Spotlight_006-007.pdf.
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substantiates our assertion by presenting generic calculations we have made on the basis of available
publication data and revenue values at global, national and institutional levels.
Global publishing and APC data
As we know from various market reports by key analysts such as Simba and PNB Paribas, annual sales ofacademic journals throughout the world currently generate commercial revenues of approximately EUR 7.6
billion. This figure is at the lower end of what is being reported; a global annual spending level of US-$ 10
billion is also quite commonly referred to. In such commentaries, several major currencies are inevitably
collapsed into one common denominator, causing a certain margin of error that may be exacerbated by thenatural fluctuation of exchange rates. Having monitored the market for many years, we feel confident withthe figure of EUR 7.6 billion (and we use EUR as reference currency in this document).
This level of spending corresponds to an annual research output of approximately 2 million journal articles,
a frequently-quoted figure that can be taken as a well-grounded assumption.5 Our own data analysis traced
1.45 million research articles in the Web of Science in 2013, roughly rounded up to 1.5 million research
articles in 2014. Since the essence of the Web of Science is to index the world’s most prestigious, largest
and most expensive journals, then all the many regional low-volume, low-profile and low-cost journals that
do not make it into the Web of Science can be considered as part of the long tail. The current annual output
of 2 million research articles can therefore be viewed as roughly 1.5 million Web of Science recorded
articles and 0.5 million additional articles.
If we were to consider the Web of Science’s indexed research articles only, the amount spent per article inthe current subscription system would be in the region of EUR 5,000. If all presumed articles were to be
included, the allocation per article would be in the region of EUR 3,800. The reality will be somewhere in
between. These calculations are shown in the following tables:(a) Web of Science annual articles calculation
Global journal subscription spending
Web of Science listed articles only
Calculated expenses per article (rounded)

EUR 7.6 billion
1.5 million papers
EUR 5,000(b) Total annual articles calculation
Global journal subscription spending
Total estimated articles output
Calculated expenses per article (rounded)

EUR 7.6 billion
2.0 million papers
EUR 3,800

Insight 1

Under the current subscription system, a figure between EUR 3,800 and 5,000 is already being
paid per research article through library subscription spending.

5Cf., for instance, STM Report 2014 (2015). http://www.markwareconsulting.com/the-stm-report/.
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From what we know, it is safe to assume that in a predominantly open access publishing system theaverage article costs would not nearly be as high. Of course, it is conceivable that individual high-profile
journals may have expensive production costs and would have to set their charges in such a range orperhaps even beyond, but – given the vast stratification of journals – such an ‘elite’ is a very small
proportion of the total. In the emerging new realities we will see a widely distributed range of APCs, fromthe very low end to a very high end. Whether calculated as mean or median, however, the average APC
index will never be dictated by the high-end values.
Research institutions and funders that have a support scheme for APCs in place are increasingly monitoring
and reporting their spending data. For instance, we at the Max Planck Digital Library have begun to upload
our APC data to a workspace on GitHub, provided by the OpenAPC initiative under the guidance of Bielefeld
University. So far we have documented over 1,046 of our APC invoices; the total spend (including taxes) of
some EUR 1.3 million results in an average APC value of EUR 1,258 for the Max Planck Society. Similarvalues are also reported by several of the German universities that are being supported by the German
Research Foundation (DFG) to build up their own publication funds. They upload their APC data to the same
system, bringing the total record to 2,387 articles, with a total expenditure of almost EUR 3 million and an
average APC fee of EUR 1,239.6
The figures reported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) are very similar to the collective data from
Germany. An average Gold APC of EUR 1,282 could be observed in 2014, constituting a slight decrease
compared with the 2013 figure of EUR 1,393.7
According to initial findings of the SCOAP3 Consortium, the publication costs per article in that sector are
actually just under EUR 1,100, despite previously expensive subscription journals from the field of physics
being switched to a publication cost model in 2014.8
The Wellcome Trust was the first body to make its APC records public. Its recent annual report for 20132014 is already its second. In the past year, some 2,556 articles have been published under an APC modelwith Wellcome support, and the total spend for the year 2013-14 was just under £4.7 million (EUR 6.4
million). The average APC was around £1,837 (EUR 2,495).9 The crucial reason why Wellcome’s average fee
is significantly higher than the German, Austrian and SCOAP3 figures lies in the fact that the Wellcome
Trust – like the Research Councils UK10 – includes hybrid APCs, which are not only much higher than mostpure open access costs but are also widely considered not to reflect a true market value. In Germany andmany other countries, hybrid APCs are excluded from the central funding schemes. The Wellcome Trust’sreport shows that hybrid articles account for 75% of their total; if we consider only their articles in pureopen access journals, then the average APC goes down to £1,241 (EUR 1,686). This figure is closer to theGerman evidence, but still higher. One explanation might be that the Wellcome Trust puts no limit on APCs,
6

Jochen Apel et al. (2014-): Datasets on fee-based open access publishing across German institutions. Bielefeld
University. https://github.com/OpenAPC/openapc-de (figures as of 4 April 2015; data will constantly be expanded).
7
Falk Reckling, Katharina Rieck (2015): Austrian Science Fund (FWF) publication cost data 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1378610. Falk Reckling, Margit Kenzian (2014): Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
publication cost data 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.988754.
8
http://scoap3.org/scoap3journals/journals-apc. See also Clément Romeu et al. (2014): The SCOAP3 initiative and theopen access article-processing-charge market: global partnership and competition improve value in thedissemination of science. DOI:10.2314/CERN/C26P.W9DT.
9
http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2015/03/03/the-reckoning-an-analysis-of-wellcome-trust-open-access-spend-2013-14/
10
RCUK reports: “The subset of 55 institutions reported spending a total of £10.4million on APC payments during thefirst year, resulting in 6,504 gold papers. This implies an average APC (including VAT) of £1,600.“ Cf. Review of the
Implementation of the RCUK Policy on Open Access (2015), p. 11.
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/2014review/.
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while in other countries (such as Germany) these costs are very often capped or made subject to some cofunding from research budgets.
All the available evidence that has been published or discussed in various reports points consistently to a
predicted APC level of well below EUR 2,000 in a purely open access scenario. There is a comfortable
margin of error before spending would reach the current level of between EUR 3,800 and 5,000, so it mustbe safe to assume that the money in the system is sufficient, and that the transformation to open accesscan be achieved without any financial risks.

Insight 2
There is currently already enough money in the system. A large-scale transformation fromsubscription to open access publishing is possible without added expense.

APC breakdown by country
In order to make reliable cost projections, the necessary next step is to break down the global publishing
figures to country and eventually also institutional levels.11 For such an exercise to be meaningful it isessential to apply a key principle of the open access business model, according to which not all publications
that are legitimately listed in national or institutional bibliographies are cost-relevant, but only those where
the corresponding author is affiliated to the given country or institution. For good reasons, multi-authoredpapers will be captured in the bibliographies or institutional repositories of all their home institutions, but
in terms of cost-relevance each of these multi-counted papers needs to be paid for only once. For the time
being, the dominant model is that the corresponding author is responsible for picking up and settling theinvoice. Therefore the various national and institutional publishing lists must be de-duplicated to reflect thecorresponding author papers only, in order to make accurate budget forecasts.
For our country-level analysis, we took Germany, the United Kingdom and France as examples – Germany
being our home ground, the UK being the current hot spot in the aftermath of the Finch report, and France
having recent media coverage of leaked information about their national publisher agreements. The
following graphic, based on data from the Web of Science, shows the publication outputs (articles andreviews) from these countries over the past ten years. The consistent pattern is that the proportion ofcorresponding author papers is in the range of 65-70% of the total country output, which means that only
this subset of articles is cost-relevant. If the entire country’s output were to be financed under a purely
open access business model, only this 65-70% share would be billed in this country, while in the remaining
third of cases the costs are incurred abroad. Though the proportion may show some variation from year toyear or from country to country, it will never amount to 100%.

11

The MPDL data analysis is documented in a separate publication, which includes also data files. See Margit
Palzenberger (2015): “Number of scholarly articles per country. Data on Web of Science listed articles and reviews
2004-2013”. http://dx.doi.org/10.17617/1.2.
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For the publishing year 2013, this breakdown shows the following cost distribution for each of the three
countries in our example:
 For Germany, we can identify 70,000 APC-relevant papers of a total of 103,000 research articles andreviews listed in the Web of Science. Multiplied by our assumed EUR 2,000 average APC price, theexpected open access expenditure for Germany in 2013 would have been in the region of EUR 140
million. There are no consolidated figures for the country-wide subscription spending for scientificjournals, but experts project these costs to be well beyond EUR 200 million per year. So Germany should
be in a position to organize a large-scale open access transformation without much pain.
 For the United Kingdom, we can identify 72,000 APC-relevant papers of a total of 109,000 research
articles and reviews listed in the Web of Science. Multiplied by our assumed EUR 2,000 average APC
price, the expected open access expenditure for the UK in 2013 would have been in the region of EUR
144 million. Estimates of what the UK’s higher education institutions are paying for their journal
subscriptions vary from £160 million per year (according to Jisc Collections) to £192 million (according to
Research Libraries UK): that is, between EUR 218 and 260 million. So for the UK, too, we have a clear
picture that a comprehensive open access transformation could be done without financial stress.
 For France, we can identify 46,000 APC-relevant papers of a total of 71,000 research articles and reviews
listed in the Web of Science. Multiplied by our assumed EUR 2,000 average APC price, the expected open
access expenditure for France in 2013 would have been in the region of EUR 92 million. According toconservative estimates, it is assumed that the French academic sector is paying at least EUR 120 million
per year for their subscriptions to scientific journals. So, like Germany and the UK, France need to
anticipate no difficulties in preparing for an open access transformation.
It will be interesting to see comparable data analyzed for the United States as the biggest information
market and largest producer of research papers. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, a new project
has recently been launched to investigate a sustainable model of open access APCs for large North
American research institutions.12 The adopted name for the project, ‘Pay It Forward’, reflects a similar
12

http://payitforward-project.ucdavis.edu/.
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philosophy to that laid out in this paper. According to our own analysis of the U.S. market we would expecta share of 80% corresponding authors’ papers (309,000 of the 388,000 research articles and reviews listed
in the Web of Science in 2013) amounting to an estimated EUR 618 million of open access costs for theentire United States.13 From what we know, we assume that there is enough money available throughsubscriptions in the U.S. to make the transformation affordable there as well.
In general, our data analysis indicates a certain correlation between the country output and the share ofcorresponding author papers. This means that countries with lower output numbers can expect a lower
share of APC cost-relevant corresponding author papers, while higher output numbers correlate with ahigher share. The regional, linguistic and political background of a country also seems to play a role. In
China, Japan, South Korea, India, and Brazil we see a higher share of corresponding author papers than in
the European countries, while Canada’s position resembles that of Europe. We invite our readers to
examine their country’s performance as documented in our supplementary data publication14 and tocompare this evidence with their current national subscription spending.

Insight 3
For a meaningful cost analysis it is important to differentiate the APC-relevant articles(corresponding-author papers) from the rest of the publication record. Early examples at thecountry level further substantiate the claim that an open access transformation can be achieved
without financial risk.

APC breakdown by institution
The viability we have shown to hold at the country level applies even more dramatically in institutionalsettings. Research is done in collaboration across institutional and national boundaries. A large proportionof research papers have multiple authorship and very often emerge from more than one institution. We
have already seen at the country level that the share of corresponding authors varies from country tocountry and is always well below 100%. This share is reduced even further at the institutional level. As alarge proportion of research collaboration is organized domestically between various institutions in thesame country, the published output will again be captured in several bibliographies and perhaps
repositories, but each paper will be paid for only once. Our evidence suggests that the quantity of APCrelevant publications for a given institution lies somewhere between 40% and 60% of their total output,
depending on the research intensity and reputation of the research institution. Figures at this level arereported by some 30 German universities that are participating in the DFG’s APC funding program.
In our own case at the Max Planck Digital Library, we can look back on more than ten years of running a
dedicated program for supporting the APCs of our researchers. We are among the most experienced
libraries in the world in handling APCs, and we have continually been monitoring developments andanalyzing our findings. From our experience, we perceive a persistent pattern that is valid across thevarious open access publishers and stable over time. Our robust formula is that we expect our authors’
13
14

Cf. note 11.
Cf. note 11.
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papers to generate invoices for between 50% and 60% of the total number of papers (in fact, for somepublishers we observe shares of corresponding author papers even as low as 40%). Already we feel
confident enough to base further cost projections on this value. For instance, as the current annual journal
article output of all Max Planck Institutes is in the region of 10,000 papers, we anticipate the APC-relevant
share to be a maximum of 6,000. Hence our projected costs for a complete transformation scenario would
be no more than EUR 12 million. The Max Planck Society is a heavily output-oriented research organization
and, at the same time, a big buyer of research information. Our current spending on journal subscriptions isalready substantial enough to make the big open access transformation possible without having to ask forextra money. If we, as a very research-intensive organization, can make it, then we believe that most others
should also be able to organize the transformation within their current budget provisions.

Insight 4
While the APC-relevant article share at a country level is very often around 70%, it can easily godown to about 50% at the institutional level. This fundamental principle of allocation must be
considered when calculating the costs for an open access transformation.

4. Opening the door
The vision of a truly open access publishing system was already a constitutive (albeit implicit) element of
the earliest open access declarations and has been perpetuated ever since in many further resolutions andopen access policy statements. The energetic recent initiatives, particularly in the European context, alongwith the momentum in so many fields of scholarly publishing, have ushered open access to our threshold. It
seems that we just have to open the door and let it in.
We need to open the door to a change in the underlying business model of scholarly publishing, making theshift from subscription-based payments to open access services-based payments. The current subscription
model needs to be further developed into a truly transitional model. The modern offsetting models thatseem to mushroom everywhere with their correlation of open access publishing entitlements with
subscription spending are the most promising elements that we have at the moment. Such dual-use models
must be requested much more energetically by the research libraries on behalf of their constituencies. The
offsetting principle is finally opening up the subscription system and starting to bring it into some alignment
with open access requirements. As a consequence, the library acquisition budget is losing the hermetic sealthat dates back to the print era and that has remained so pervasive in the daily routines of most libraries.
Finally, the libraries and consortia of the world are beginning to live up to the expectations that have beenraised by the many open access resolutions of the past decade.
Broadening the scope of subscription agreements and of library acquisition budgets is a necessary but not
sufficient step. We libraries must also be more aware of the demographics of the published research
output than ever before. In a world based on open access business models a new stratification of services
and costs will emerge, requiring new criteria for the selection and aggregation processes in the libraries, fortheir internal workflows, and for the necessary tools and skills that they will employ. The transactions thatneed to be organized by the libraries on behalf of their patrons will be very different in an open access
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world compared with the subscription system. There will need to be a new billing and supporting
infrastructure, starting at submission, to make the system robust and scalable for large publishing volumes.
Work on this has already begun, as exemplified, for instance, in the Efficiency and Standards for Article
Charges (ESAC) initiative.15
Regardless of some regional specialties, scientific publishing is a truly international enterprise. Therefore afundamental change in the underlying business model can only be achieved on a global scale. The world’s
research organizations, together with their libraries, need to act jointly and with some coordination, withthe key aim of shifting the money out of the subscription system and so that it can be re-invested in open
access publishing. This coordinated move will also give an unambiguous message to the publishers, so thatthey themselves can adapt to the new business model with confidence in its financial sustainability for the
future. In the end, neither the libraries nor the publishing houses need lose their roles; all the players willbe transformed, emerging with new vigor in a modernized publishing system.
The time is ripe for the global research community to accelerate the transition to open access. We have thecrucial opportunity to transform the underlying business model of journal publishing while protecting thefinancial viability and core functionalities of the publishing system at large. Ultimately, all subscription
spending must be stopped: this is the simple culmination of the incremental steps of the past decade. The
significant savings can then be reinvested for the co-creation of a range of publishing services that will truly
serve the scholarly endeavors of the 21st century.

15

http://esac-initiative.org/.
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