The Biochemical Society was established in 1911 during the early origins of molecular biology and, based on the number of members, is the largest UK-based, single discipline focused society within the biosciences. We are a charity existing to serve and advance the molecular biosciences. The Society carries out scientific meetings, gives out grants and awards, does policy and public engagement work, runs training events and courses, disseminates knowledge, has about 7,000 members, and offers its range of activities and programmes to the entire community of molecular bioscientists based all over the world. The Society owns and publishes six journals plus one free-to-read magazine and also publishes a seventh journal that is co-owned with the Royal Society of Biology. This makes the Biochemical Society a self-publishing society, and we own our own publishing arm, Portland Press. All titles are published via Portland Press, the wholly owned subsidiary of the Society, and all surpluses made through publishing activities are returned to the Society in support of the Society's programme of charitable and scientific activities. Publishing remains one of the Society's activities; bringing together bioscientists and disseminating knowledge (including via published articles) is part of the organization's mission-driven work. Publishing also contributes >70% of the Society's income, essentially funding its charitable and community-focussed work. Being owned by the Biochemical Society means that Portland Press' work and commercial strategies must be in harmony with the community of scientists that the Society serves and must stay true to the Society's mission to advance the molecular biosciences. In this, we face something of a ‘paywall conundrum’, explored further in an article published in August 2019 in the Society's magazine (Legge, 2019). Acknowledging this, the Biochemical Society has been committed to open access (OA) for a long time. In 2012, the Society's Bioscience Reports journal was flipped to full OA. This was a hard, ‘cliff-edge’ type of flip, where, overnight, substantially all articles needed to start yielding an article publishing charge (APC) to support Gold OA publication under a CC BY licence. Copyflow in this title plummeted to nearly zero as a result, and the journal struggled (both for copy and financially) for 5 years before turning a profit well into its sixth year from ‘the flip’. At an overall portfolio level, the Portland Press journals owned by the Biochemical Society currently publish >50% of content on an OA basis; the percentage of OA content differs from title to title across the seven (two full OA and five hybrid OA) journals, with the average percentage of OA content in hybrid journals being about 20%. In the subsequent section of this article, our 10 operating principles for commencing a transition to OA publishing models are explained, with some examples of how we are living these principles included, and a brief look at questions that are still unanswered at this stage. These principles are derived from the Biochemical Society and Portland Press' latest open scholarship position statement (referenced under principle 1 below) (Biochemical Society and Portland Press, 2019a). A large share of the thinking in these principles also reflects my personal views that were arrived at by reviewing internal data and distilling conversations had over the last year with internal colleagues, institutions, funders, Biochemical Society trustees/Committee members, and also colleagues based at other learned society publishers, many of whom are now organized into the relatively newly formed Society Publishers' Coalition or SocPC. In terms of setting out the wider learned society context, as covered in a blog from the SocPC in October 2019 (SocPC, 2019), it is worth noting that many society journals are actively engaged with open scholarship and transparency. Learned societies have launched or flipped over 1,000 OA journals (see https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Societies_and_Open_Access_Research and also https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A52hoXkXwvhQGpmVi1z2zcDRTTOZqEPdY_PHV9nY6kc/edit#gid=1), and some societies have been looking at models to enable full OA without charging authors for a few years now. The Royal Society of Chemistry's Gold for Gold experiment (that ran to the end of 2016) and the Institute of Physics' past collaborations with SCOAP3 and CERN (IOP, 2013) are good examples of learned societies' willingness to experiment and trial new models. While funder and publisher policies and priorities around OA differ greatly across the globe, the thinking around transitioning to OA presented in this article is driven by internal strategic commitment to scope and commence a transition. The principles for commencing a transition to OA that appear below represent the perspective of a small (as defined by a portfolio of seven journals), self-publishing learned society in the STM sector. This article then goes on to explore how these principles have translated into live pilots for 2020, and lessons learned. Considering several scenarios, the Portland Press Board of Directors specifically chose a transition to OA in June 2017 – more than a year before Plan S was announced. The Society then published its first Open Science policy in April 2018 (Biochemical Society, 2018). The Society and Portland Press now share a joint commitment to transition to OA, judging this to be appropriate and useful to the molecular bioscience community of researchers; moreover, this goal is also judged to be possible for seven journals publishing in molecular biology and the life sciences, where funding for OA publication abounds. (How reasonable a transition to full and immediate OA might be for titles in other subject-areas is a separate topic that is not explored in this article.) We are committed to scoping and making a transition to OA, and this trajectory is now written in to our strategy for 2019–2021 (Biochemical Society and Portland Press, 2019b). Arriving at this position gives us clarity and focus, equipping Trustees, journal Editors in Chief, Editorial Board members, and staff to work together with common purpose to assess the next steps and tackle the specifics of charting a way forward. During OA week in October 2019, the Society and Portland Press released a joint position statement on open scholarship (Biochemical Society and Portland Press, 2019a). We have taken the position of being willing to experiment and pilot different offerings in order to see how much of a transition we can affect for our journals in what we judge to be a fair and sustainable way for researchers, for institutions, and for the Biochemical Society. At our size and with our mission-driven purpose, following exactly in the footsteps of large commercial publishers (operating at a different scale) was not going to be a helpful way forward; while we have taken inspiration and learnings from existing ‘read and publish’ deals, we have also brought different thinking to sales offerings and have been willing to trial these so we can learn by doing. Our goal is financial sustainability. We see sustainability as protecting our income and having enough income, year on year, to allow the Society to continue its charitable work, as well as generating enough income to invest in and continuously improve on and innovate with the services we offer the global research community. Approximately 75% of our income is reliant on subscriptions to and purchase of paywalled content. We are aiming to rewire the current subscription income in favour and support of OA publishing. As a first step, we see this ‘rewiring’ taking place by clubbing together reading/subscription and OA publishing (APC) spends into a single offering. This approach has much precedent and has been variously called ‘read and publish’, ‘publish and read’, striking ‘transformative agreements’ (see Efficiency and Standards in Article Charges [ESAC], n.d.), or ‘transformative arrangements (cOAlition S, 2019), as well as a transitional agreement’ (Jisc, personal communication, September 2019). The initiative for ESAC broadly defines transformative agreements as ‘temporary and transitional’ contracts negotiated between institutions and publishers ‘that transform the business model underlying scholarly journals from subscription to open access’. In practice, however, there is variation in how individual funders, institutions, and publishers interpret (and the latter implement) such agreements. For the remainder of this article, the term ‘transformative’, abbreviated to Tx, will be used specifically to describe the Biochemical Society and Portland Press' ‘flavour’ of ‘read and publish’ pilot offerings that, save for a simultaneous and similar approach of the Microbiology Society, we do not believe has precedent and that we are piloting for 2020. Our Tx approach is a pilot programme commencing in 2020 that offers institutions access to paywalled content plus unlimited, APC-free OA publishing for affiliated corresponding authors at a single, fixed fee that will not change regardless of the number of OA articles published under the deal. We strongly believe that the ability to publish should not be linked to an individual researcher's ability to pay; in 2018, our journals had authors (both co-authors and corresponding authors) based in 60 different countries. Authors in different parts of the world have varying sources of funding for OA publishing; while we are seeking a transition to full OA publishing, we are keen on moving away from transactional APCs as the sole model of choice for transitioning to OA as this would increase the number of mandatory invoices landing in front of individual authors and researchers. A transition to OA and rewiring of subscription spending gives us the opportunity to move away from individual APCs. This is not to say that an APC model is, in general, invalid. We do have one (growing) full-OA journal that is currently supported by individual APC payments. However, our general thinking about APCs is that it is not the model of choice for facilitating a transition away from paywalls. We do not think it would be sustainable, equitable, or efficient if all OA publishing in the entire scholarly communications ecosystem were to be carried out under transactional APCs. Rather than proliferating invoices and transactions, we are seeking alternative, more researcher-friendly solutions for our transition path. If OA needs to evolve beyond the APC (which we believe it must, especially in the case of transitioning hybrid titles and paywalled content), then the simplest first step, as we see it, is to harness payments and transactions already being made in order to support ongoing OA publishing. Our Tx pilots have already been agreed upon with two consortia and are offered to hundreds of individual subscribing institutions in their renewal cycle for 2020. Unlike most other transformative offerings that we are aware of, our Tx model will offer ‘all-inclusive’ read and publish, providing unlimited OA publishing, on an APC-free basis, alongside read access to all our currently hybrid journal titles with paywalled content. The unlimited OA publishing without APCs extends to all journals in the portfolio: all five subscription/hybrid journals, as well as our two full-OA journals. Doing this upholds the previous ‘reduce APC invoices’ principle and gives us a mechanism to trial a model that, depending on uptake and success, could move us away not just from the legacy subscription model but also from article-level APCs in the full-OA titles that currently depend solely on APCs. As a possible route to a sustainable transition, we posit that increased uptake of our Tx offerings will affect (or at least move us further towards) full OA. When most or enough content in our currently hybrid journals is published OA under a Tx deal, we will then be able to flip these journals to being fully OA. This leads to the question of what ‘most’ or ‘enough’ means. As we stand on the brink of pilot deals for 2020 (see next point), we cannot, at this moment, affix a specific percentage to this. What we do need in terms of being able to transition or flip titles in the future is sufficient uptake of the Tx offerings followed by suitable levels of publishing in the journals, which lead to ongoing support of the Tx offering for future years. In other words, increasing uptake of our Tx offerings across institutions can become the mechanism that supports our ability to transition the Biochemical Society's journals to full OA, but our ability to do this (and remain financially viable) rests on both uptake of the offering and subsequent value in the deal driven by publication in the journals from affiliated researchers. In terms of what would happen in future years (i.e. as more OA content is published in the journals via affiliated researchers at participating institutions), the idea would be that our ‘read and publish’ offering transitions into a ‘publish and read’ offering where payments in the same transactions from participating institutions start to be weighted more heavily towards publishing, while the ‘read’ component of the payment is for a diminishing share of any paywalled content and legacy content. At the point of a theoretical full flip, institutions will be paying for the ongoing ability of their researchers to publish OA in the journals. The thinking around the future of our Tx sales is far less developed as we are focusing on the immediate offering. We fully expect that the adoption of the initial pilots will lead us to evolve our approach and any next steps. One way or another, it is expected, however, that a fresh approach to pricing will need to emerge that is based on a shared understanding (between publishers, institutions, and researchers) of the value of independently peer reviewed publications. For an organization that has already committed to making a sustainable transition for a more open future, the fixed timeline of requiring compliant journals or by a Plan S start of and of can be something of a funding and and differ across countries. We need to be able to serve researchers from to and from to Our has been to being by which policy start to on or how many years we have for This can be to the mission of what a sustainable transition and taking steps towards with and institutions has been for a publisher of our size we have to models and models with institutions our small size was a and us to the of most and The that we in 2019, been able to with consortia about possible Tx pilots is in large part to with the Open and Plan S, see 2019). Our commitment to transition models and our willingness to pilot some offerings for 2020 that different from the existing read and and read offerings have also open to having conversations with institutions about something the thinking in these seven principles have to us two of pilots for 2020. In our first we are offering all existing a Tx in the renewal we are that is within a the – if – as part of their renewal to a Tx read and publish and flip from corresponding authors via unlimited APC-free OA. through or with the is being offered to some We have been with subscription to do this and are to be supported by for these pilot offerings being in the and any that is not subscribing via a has the to their subscription to read our paywalled content and have corresponding authors publish an unlimited of OA articles without APCs. We are with to offer the Tx to existing 1 this providing further through consortia One of our or publishing institutions Our in the and conversations with have made it possible for us to be Tx pilot agreements. In this on APCs and subscriptions is together and the for pricing a Tx offering that gives corresponding authors the ability to publish on an unlimited, APC-free OA in all two full OA and five hybrid As of 2019, we have a transformative with the of and a transition pilot agreed with to the unlimited OA can publish’ supported by our all institutions taking one of our Tx offerings stand to or all published in our journal to full OA. For for OA article published by a corresponding in 2019, we published article from a different corresponding a The pilot could transform that and could the number of OA articles published in Portland Press journals over the next years in a that APC-free OA publishing become the for researchers. The Biochemical Society carries out activities to serve molecular and it is to remain by this in APC-free that work This and to the is good a Tx deal based on APC-free OA but then not being willing or able to the needed to support the offering. We currently work with and both and and will be on these to our We work with the and this has access to on APC spends and published OA articles where have been In 2019, we a of society publishers seeking a sustainable transition to OA that have together to the relatively new Society Publishers' Coalition (SocPC, out with a of this now has publishing over journals and over articles The SocPC is a that has a defined mission around seeking a sustainable transition to open societies have together under the SocPC to share and other out a sustainable transition path. This has a of and a support One other society within the – the Microbiology Society – has a similar approach to transitioning as out in the principles and, during the of 2019, has agreements with and other consortia based on and publishing spends to both access to and APC-free OA publishing in its journals for a single, fixed The Microbiology Society has also offered subscribing institutions and at a subscriptions in the renewal cycle for 2020 (see on society publishing from the Microbiology Society is 2019). type of read and publish approach from a different self-publishing learned society has been in for over a The has had live and deals with several institutions that offer a similar of OA with read see learned society publishers within the SocPC are also actively a approach to striking transformative deals is The thinking is that this could at and be more than individual between small society publisher and This approach is an ongoing topic of for many of that are publishing learned societies within the SocPC. While our position for Tx agreements and making a transition is based on on subscriptions and we are piloting these for 2020 and are open to based on where stand a year from now. As the next section of this article our pilots will not and are at this to good for all of open do our Tx offerings fully all of the research community. We are open to other be or We expect that our which are will need to and we support a of the for pricing ‘read and publish’ or ‘publish and read’ offerings over the We to principles around such pricing through with institutions, as well as and other learned A approach to transitioning that we are following is the approach from (see 2019, and The approach the existing cycle for the fully journals where are offered a to to the that, if a number of institutions the then all content in the subsequent of the journal will be published OA. We this as a and a possible future for Portland Press might be to explore the of an approach for all our journals or for the fully of Portland Press journals. The Biochemical and Microbiology pilot transformative offerings have based pricing for 2020 on (or spends on subscription plus APCs. different thinking around pricing of transformative ‘read and publish’ offerings from the of based in the that its new model in October The model is a that average article publication to which an is and into that the will the that does not change during the term of the (see Considering the to evolve publishing, we also the of open such as by to be Open is an early of this while a more launched in the is Open were as one of several transition models in the In this content is and peer the peer and in the case of the and of the content place the content has been to have and peer with The financial sustainability with this however, is how it can be in any way other than individual article payments to the and and support peer is or in place to rewire subscription spending across the funder support and institutions and consortia and but not at least not is is there a for institutions, in order to support APC-free publishing The does have and that helpful around articles published (or OA articles that could be under a transformative offer used and by Portland Press, and for institutions is a of the the is not a used and it remains a that is on the or 2019), and this be based on the from Science The OA is that, might be able to published with However, other than of these currently the brief of being an that both institutions and the publisher can to a offering. At the moment, the Tx route us some steps forward. However, and (both large and institutions, and researchers are some of out of the and this is not a good for subscription access and OA publishing for these of the scientific community. The principles have not on beyond OA that to the wider question of open open research and are not and to with is an that needs and to be able to a transition towards open The future is we do not what of our offers we will an offering of unlimited, APC-free OA publishing, we are of what our 2020 pilots will for journal copy in terms of and published is a and we also do not what the of funding from institutions or research will look or years from now. with in a this year, we that rewiring for a sustainable OA future will need a approach to pricing based on a and shared understanding of what it is a publisher offers and should offer for the in this of an future However, we see to be from a in a solely in subscriptions to paywalled content that is in world and for research institutions and researchers. The Biochemical Society and its wholly owned Portland Press, are seeking to and be part of a sustainable and more open The thinking presented in this article has about as a of conversations with and from colleagues within the Biochemical of the Biochemical Society's and the Board of Portland Press and at (and the of the by and and conversations with at and of and the Open 2020 as well as and conversations with colleagues are of the Society Publishers'
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Malavika Legge (2020) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched one closely related paper. Consider it for comparative context: