The whole scholarly communications ecosystem is in a transition, and the open access policies of funders and other institutions have been incredibly powerful for driving the transition to open access (OA) publishing. These policies are converging on a few key principles while leaving journals with flexibility in how they deliver policy-compliant OA publishing services to authors. We believe there is a widely shared ambition for a sustainable open access future for journals, but there are many routes to reach that goal.

One of these routes involves a rights retention strategy. Here, an institute or funder creates a legal agreement with an author that establishes an obligation for the author to make pre-final versions of their articles OA under a liberal Creative Commons licence (CC-BY) as soon as the final versions of their articles are published. The legal agreement pre-dates, and therefore can take precedence over, a subsequent publishing agreement between the author and a journal. We understand that many organizations feel the need to adopt rights retention strategies during the transition to full open access to ensure that researchers have a route to comply with open access mandates.

Our approach

We would now like to clarify how we are helping authors to publish open access research articles in subscription journals and in hybrid journals (which have not yet completed a transition to fully OA research content) when their institute or funder has adopted a rights retention strategy.

Our transformation to fully open research is focused on making all final published versions of articles OA (Gold OA); we are committed to continue publishing research purely based on its academic suitability for our journals. Our hybrid journals provide a route for all authors who are subject to rights retention strategies to publish their articles as Gold OA. Most authors will either be able to publish their research with us as Gold OA via their institute’s transformative agreement (TA) or will have access to funding for an article processing charge (APC). But where authors subject to rights retention do not either fall within a TA or have funds for an APC, we will publish the final versions of their research articles as Gold OA without charge.

Authors will, of course, be able to continue to make their pre-final versions open access under the terms of their rights retention agreements. This will be particularly important to authors publishing in the small number of our subscription journals that do not yet offer any Gold OA options for research content.

Our policy of providing Gold OA without charge for articles subject to rights retention is a transitionary measure for hybrid journals that are still in the process of transforming to full OA. We anticipate the policy will run until the end of 2024, but it will remain under review and we may need to make adjustments along the way.

The policy does not apply to journals that are already fully open research. An author in these journals will fall within a TA, will have funding for an APC, or will be eligible for an APC waiver.

We have focused our transformation to fully open research on Gold OA because we believe that, for our publishing programme at least, making only pre-final versions of articles OA is inequitable for readers and is financially unsustainable. It is inequitable because many readers will not benefit from the higher-quality content of the final published articles, for example the corrected errors in text and figures. Making only pre-final versions of articles OA is financially unsustainable because it depends upon subscribers continuing to pay to read the final published articles. It will not take many cancellations for our journals to become financially unviable. Our open research transformation must mean no more paywalls for any readers. Our open research transformation will result in all final published articles being OA under fully OA business models.

It is critical that the application of rights retention strategies do not undermine our transformation and hinder our move away from subscription revenues. We emphasize that there is no such thing as ‘OA publishing for free’: it costs our journals the same amount of money to publish an article whether a pre-final version or the final published version is open access. We appreciate, however, that open access publishing must be financially sustainable not just for us but also for the global research community, and we continue to work hard with the community to make this true.