*UPDATED 17 November 2020*

For some time now we have been committed to a transition to totally open research. And therefore we greatly appreciate the commitment that cOAlition S have made to funding the costs of Gold Open Access journal publishing. We are now pleased to be supporting their transformative journals programme as a new route to compliance with Plan S.

Our primary path to a sustainable, Open Access future continues to be through Read and Publish agreements, consistent with the transformative agreements route of Plan S. The transformative journals programme provides a welcome and much-needed opportunity for us to offer a Plan S-compliant publishing route to the many authors who are not yet covered by a Read and Publish agreement.

The transformative journals programme involves specific commitments which we support and will do our very best to meet as fully and quickly as possible. Many of the journals we publish may not meet all the OA growth targets purely on the basis of cOAlition S’s funding for OA. We need a continued, widespread move to funding for Open Access around the world, through transformative agreements or other approaches. Global cohesion in the flip to open will benefit society in many ways, both economically and through more efficient and more effective research.

Both the transformative journals and transformative agreements routes in Plan S are transitionary, and cOAlition S’s support for them is due to end from 2025. We can’t completely predict how our publishing models will look after 2025. Read and Publish agreements could simply become Publishing Agreements, and there may be other pillars of financial support for example to assist unfunded authors.

However our publishing models develop, transformative journals will be important in helping us make the transition to fully open research.

*UPDATE*

We’re pleased to say we’ve now submitted 209 journals to cOAlition S, which includes all 118 hybrid journals that CUP owns and 91 of the hybrid journals owned in whole or part by our society partners. We continue to discuss the Transformative Journals route with our other publishing partners.

These 209 journals have all committed to the goal of transitioning to fully open research by gradually increasing their open access content in line with open access growth targets set by cOAlition S. We will continue to reduce the subscription prices for these and other journals through our double-dipping policy as the amount of non-open access content falls.

Researchers can make use of the Transformative Journals option for Plan S compliance from 1st January 2021. Please see our full list of journals, and cOAlition S’s list of transformative journals.