Transformative Journals: analysis from the 2023 reports
28/06/2024
Introduction
The Transformative Journal (TJ) model was one of the strategies cOAlition S developed to help subscription publishers transition to full and immediate Open Access (OA) in a defined timeframe. This report looks at the data provided by the participating publishers for the calendar year 2023.
2023 data: executive summary
Journals that participate in the TJ programme agree to share data showing the OA penetration rate and whether they have met their agreed growth targets.
Specifically, TJ titles are required to demonstrate an annual increase in the proportion of OA research content of at least 5% points in absolute terms and at least 15% in relative terms, year-on-year. Journals in the programme also agree to flip to full OA when 75% of the research content is published in this way.
Analysis of the 2023 data shows that of the 996 titles in the TJ programme:
39 titles (4%) had flipped to full OA and thus had successfully transformed, in line with the programme objectives
403 titles (40%) met or exceeded their OA growth targets
552 titles (56%) failed to meet their OA growth targets and, had the TJ programme continued, would have been removed from the TJ programme
2 titles (<1%) only started publishing in 2023 and thus did not have a 2023 TJ target.
A further 57 journals, all published by Cambridge University Press, are in the process of flipping in 2025. Springer Nature also indicated that 14 journals are likely to flip in 2025, though the titles affected are not yet in the public domain.
Note: Neither the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (1 TJ) nor the IEEE (162 TJs) provided their TJ reports. As such, in this analysis, all these titles are deemed to have not met their OA penetration targets.
Figure 1: Summary of the 2023 TJ data
Methodology
All TJ publishers were provided with a reporting template to indicate, for each TJ, how many research articles they published in 2023, and how many were published as OA. Using previously publisher-supplied data from 2022, the template automatically determined whether the 2023 growth target had been met and, if so, what the new OA penetration target is for 2024. The template also collected data on citations and downloads to show how articles published OA compared with articles (in the same title) published behind a paywall.
In analysing the reports, all titles were assigned a status of one of four mutually exclusive types:
Journal has already flipped to full OA – and thus is no longer treated as a TJ
Journal has met the OA growth targets
Journal has not met the TJ growth targets
Other: this includes journals which were recently launched and thus had no OA target for 2023, or which have ceased publication, or moved to another publisher.
Note that if a publisher indicated that they planned to flip some titles to full OA in 2025, this doesn’t affect its TJ status for this report. For example, if a title missed its 2023 target, it will still be classified as such, even if the journal is planning to flip to full OA in 2025.
2023 report: publisher analysis
Of the 20 publishers in the TJ programme, four (Company of Biologists, EMBO Press, Geological Society of London and the Royal Society) met their OA growth targets for 100% of titles in their portfolios.
Cambridge University Press (Figure 2) is also well on the way to a full transition to OA, in line with their publicly stated ambition to realise this by 2025. With a portfolio of 224 titles, some 15% (33 journals) had already transitioned to full OA, whilst 72% (162 journals) met their OA growth targets. As such the number of journals which missed their OA KPI was just 13% (29 titles).
Figure 2: CUP performance of TJs
Other publishers who have also performed well in meeting their OA growth targets include Canadian Science Publishing, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and Karger who met or exceeded their OA growth targets in 77%, 75%, and 74% of their titles respectively.
However, many other publishers experienced problems in meeting their OA growth targets. For example, the BMJ (who had 30 journals in the programme) failed to meet OA growth targets for any of their journals.
Springer Nature (SN) – the single biggest publisher in the TJ programme – ended the year with just 117 journals still eligible for inclusion in the TJ programme. This is in stark contrast compared with 2022 data, when SN still had 1721 titles enrolled in the programme. And, though some have flipped to full OA, some 1572 titles (91%) have over the past two years failed to meet growth targets and become ineligible as TJs.
This mixed picture – with some publishers successfully transitioning to OA and others not so – suggests that there is not a single strategy for transitioning to OA. That said, based on the evidence from the TJ reports, learned society and university press publishers tend to be more successful in transitioning than their commercial counterparts.
Figure 3 provides a summary of all the data provided by all participating publishers. Further information is provided in Annex A.
Figure 3: TJ summary by publisher
Longitudinal analysis: 2020 – 2023
As cOAlition S has been collecting data for the last four years (2020, 2021, 2022 and this report), Table 1 provides a snapshot of the TJ programme over this period.
Year
Number of publishers participating in the TJ programme
Number of journals initially enrolled in the TJ programme
Number of TJ titles flipped to OA
% of titles that met OA growth target
% of TJ titles failed to meet growth target
Number of journals remaining in the TJ programme at year-end
2020
14
2240
Year 0 – baseline data
2240
2021
16
2304
13 (<1%)
44%
56%
2304*
2022
16
2326
26 (1%)
30%
68%
737
2023
20
988
39 (4%)
40%
56%
430
*Although 56% of journals failed to meet their OA growth targets, cOAlition S agreed that as this was a new initiative, these titles could remain in the programme.
Table 1: TJ programme summary, 2020 - 2023
Although there are positive findings that can be drawn from these data – such as 78 journals successfully flipping from a subscription model to OA – the most striking observation is the relatively small number of journals which have retained their TJ status (figure 4). Of the 2,304 journals participating in this initiative in 2021, only 430 remained eligible by the end of 2023. Expressed more simply, only one out of five titles that initially joined the programme maintained their Transformative Journal status after two years..
Figure 4: Number of journals remaining in the TJ programme at year-end
OA reach: download and citation data
Participating publishers are also asked to provide data showing the number of downloads and citations for articles published OA in TJs and how these compare to articles, in the same titles, which are paywalled. The aim here is to understand whether OA articles have a greater reach than paywalled articles.
As noted in previous reports, the data consistently shows that, on average, OA content is downloaded more often than subscription content in the same journal.
For example, Elsevier reported that in 2023 OA articles published in TJs were downloaded, on average, 3.3 times more than subscription articles in the same journals (187,513 downloads for OA articles in TJ titles compared with 57,357 downloads for paywalled articles in TJ titles).
The citation data, however, are less clear-cut. For example, in the case of Royal Society TJs, OA articles received significantly more citations on average (1.75 citations) compared to paywalled articles (1.2 citations). In contrast, data from the Royal Society of Chemistry indicate no difference in citation numbers between OA and paywalled articles, with both reporting an average of 1.6 citations.
Conclusion
At the launch of Plan S, cOAlition S recognised that transformative arrangements (including TJs) would provide a useful means to repurpose funds for journal subscriptions to publication fees, thus supporting legacy publishers in transforming paywalled to Open Access publication models. It was, however, also made clear that the transformation would have to be completed at a definite point in time, by the end of 2024 at the latest.
As such, support for TJ programme will cease at this time. Participating publishers will be asked to provide a final report (for the year 2024) which will enable us to present a final analysis of the TJ programme.
cOAlition S took this decision as we believe that the strategy of providing financial support for these arrangements beyond this date would significantly increase the risk that these arrangements will become permanent and perpetuate hybrid Open Access, which cOAlition S has always firmly opposed.
And, though there are some success stories highlighted in this report, in aggregate the TJ data clearly shows that the transition to full and immediate OA for many of the TJ publishers is still a long way away.
To help secure a fair and equitable open access landscape – and mindful that Funders’ budgets are finite – cOAlition S members will begin to direct their efforts to more innovative and community-led Open Access publishing initiatives that aim to deliver full and immediate Open Access in a shorter timeframe.
Robert Kiley Head of Strategy, cOAlition S
Note 1: The complete data set on which the analysis was based can be downloaded here.
Note 2: This post has been updated on 28th June 2024 to reflect corrected data for the American Chemical Society (ACS)
Robert Kiley is Head of Strategy at cOAlition S, working to accelerate the transition to full and immediate Open Access. Prior to this, he was Head of Open Research at the Wellcome Trust, where he was responsible for developing and implementing their open research strategy. Over the past decade, Robert has played a leading role in the implementation of Wellcome's open access policy and overseeing the development of the Europe PubMed Central repository. He also led the development - in partnership with Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society - of eLife, the open-access research journal, launched in 2012. More recently he championed the work to create a new open publishing platform for Wellcome researchers – Wellcome Open Research.
Robert is a qualified librarian and an Associate Member of CILIP. He is a Board member of Open Research Central and served for 6 years on the ORCID Board of Directors.
