Last month, cOAlition S published an annual review of their transformative journals programme, based on data provided by publishers including our own (download our 2022 transformative journals report here). The review provides a useful snapshot of how a range of journals from different publishers are transforming to fully open research, and it provides yet more evidence that the transformation leads to increased readership and use of published research.

We’ve supported cOAlition S’s transformative journals programme since its first year, and we continue to believe that it is a welcome addition to the approaches available to us to drive the move to full open research.

For a publisher such as us, with transformative journals across a wide range of subject areas and a global distribution of authors, it is inevitable that the open access transformation will proceed a little unevenly across different journals and that their rate of open access growth can fluctuate from year to year. Looking at our transformative journals programme as a whole, we exceeded the open access growth target set by cOAlition S by more last year (2022) than in 2021, and we crossed the milestone of more than 50% open research across our entire journals portfolio in 2022.

Some individual journals did not meet their open access growth target in 2022 and as a result cOAlition S will de-list them at the end of this year. Five of our transformative journals have already ‘flipped’ to full open access in 2023, and a further 26 are included in our announcement to flip 41 journals in 2024. Of the remaining 192 transformative journals, 69 are being removed by cOAlition S from their programme in 2024.

All our transformative journals, including those that are being removed by cOAlition S, remain committed to the open access transformation. Our goal remains to transition the vast majority of our research to full open access by 2025. The main driver for this continues to be, at least for a while longer, transformative agreements with our institutional customers. We now partner with over 2,000 institutions in this way to publish their research outputs as open access. Our success with transformative agreements is allowing us to substantially expand our programme of journal flips to full open access.

We also continue to work hard with other groups around the world on ensuring that all authors are able to publish their research open access, as shown most recently by the launch of our Cambridge Open Equity Initiative and our involvement with OASPA’s equity workshops. Alongside our work on open research in journals, we continue to develop our open access books programme, particularly through Flip It Open, which is being expanding this year. As cOAlition S’s annual transformative journal report reinforces, open access publishing brings increased readership and other forms of impact, and we want every author to be able to benefit from that.