New deals could help scientific societies survive open access.

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DAVIDE BONAZZI/SALZMAN ART
▼ In the push to make the scientific literature open access, small scientific societies have feared they could be collateral damage. Many rely on subscription revenue from their journals—often among the most highly cited in their disciplines—to fund other activities, such as scholarships. And whereas big commercial publishers have the scale to absorb financial losses in some of their journals, many scientific societies operate at most a handful of journals.
A reprieve may be in sight. Last week, a project that included funders backing Plan S, the European-led effort to speed the transition to open access, released a set of contract  templates and tipsmeant to help small, independent publishers reach deals with libraries that would eventually eliminate subscriptions while protecting revenue. The project also helped arrange pilots, which may soon be inked, that use the guidance; they will allow researchers served by library consortia to publish an unlimited number of open-access articles in return for a set fee paid to societies.
The Biochemical Society, based in London, is participating because “we have to start somewhere, and our principle is, learn by doing,” says Malavika Legge, its publishing director. The new guidance  grew out of a June workshop in London attended by two dozen society and library officials, which “opened the door to talking to librarians in a way we’ve never done before.”
Plan S, set to begin in 2021, requires researchers funded by participating agencies to ensure that their papers are immediately free to read. To ease the transition, the plan allows authors to publish in a “hybrid” journal, which has a mix of free and paywalled content, but only if the publisher commits to shifting the journal to entirely open access by 2024. Commercial publishers and their biggest customers—library consortia representing multiple research institutions—are already signing “transformative agreements” that allow researchers to read a publisher’s paywalled content while publishing open-access articles in its journals.
But negotiating those deals is complex and time consuming, putting them out of reach of many small societies. “It makes no sense for a library consortium to spend any time negotiating an agreement with a publisher they don’t publish a lot of content with,” says Michael Clarke, managing partner of Clarke & Esposito, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm whose clients include society publishers.
The report, released last week by a project called Society Publishers Accelerating Open Access and Plan S, and the associated pilot projects might help smaller societies get (▪ ▪ ▪)

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