Societies and Open Access Research

• This page is part of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP).

• The goal of the Societies and Open Access Research (SOAR) project is to maintain a comprehensive catalog of full (non-hybrid) OA journals published by scholarly societies. For this purpose, a society's relationship to its OA journals might be that of owner, publisher, or partner with the publisher.

• Peter Suber and Caroline Sutton started the project in 2007, before the launch of HOAP. But Peter Suber's participation became part of HOAP in 2011, as did Amanda Page's in 2013. However, HOAP itself is only one contributor, and Caroline Sutton continues as a project principal.

• Suggested short URL for this page = bit.ly/hoap-soar

Catalog

 

The catalog itself = Society publishers with open access journals

 

• By Caroline Sutton, Peter Suber, and Amanda Page.
• Highlight: As of January 23, 2019, the catalog lists 1,077 societies publishing 1,041 full (non-hybrid) OA journals.
• The latest edition of the catalog is the third. We released it on September 16, 2013, and update it regularly.
• The catalog is a Google Spreadsheet under a CC-BY license.
• Originally the spreadsheet was open for public editing. Unfortunately vandalism forced us to close public editing in April 2013. We experimentally re-opened it in June 2018, but similar problems forced us to close it again in December 2018. As always, the spreadsheet remains OA under a CC-BY license for reading and reuse, and we continue to update it ourselves. If you would like editing privileges, please let us know. If you have additions or corrections, please send them to Amanda Page.
• Suggested short URL for the catalog = bit.ly/oaj-society

• Editions of the catalog, and accompanying articles
  • Caroline Sutton and Peter Suber released the first edition of the catalog in September 2007. At that time, the catalog was a downloadable Excel spreadsheet under a CC-BY license.
    • Caroline and Peter also wrote an article to accompany the catalog, Society publishers with open access journals, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, November 2, 2007.
  • Caroline and Peter released the second edition on December 2, 2011. This edition launched the Google spreadsheet still in use for the third and current edition.
    • Peter wrote an article to accompany the second edition, Open access journals from society publishers, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, December 2, 2011.
  • The second edition was open to public edits, and continuously updated. For those reasons, we didn't plan to release a third edition. But we did so in September 2013 in order to add Amanda Page as a co-author and recognize her work enlarging and improving the catalog.
  • The first edition of the catalog listed both full and hybrid OA journals. But the second and third editions list only full (non-hybrid) OA journals.
  • Amanda Page created a series of maps, released on October 21, 2013, to show the locations of the societies publishing OA journals.

Related resources

• Anne Britton, Open-Access Society Publishers in Wikidata, September 6, 2019.

• Rod Cookson, Learned societies more confident about future – and a ‘new pragmatism’ on Open Access, Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), August 6, 2014.

• Sarah Cooney-McQuat, Stefan Busch, and Deborah Kahn, Open access publishing: a viable solution for society publishers, Learned Publishing, April 2010.

• Martin Paul Eve, How Learned Societies Could Flip to Open Access, With No Author-Facing Charges, Using a Consortial Model, January 21, 2018.

• Nicky Ferguson, David Jennings, Seb Schmoller and Caroline Sutton, Gold Open Access for Learned Societies?, UK Open Access Implementation Group, last revised October 2013.

• Robert Harington, Diamond Open Access, Societies and Mission, Scholarly Kitchen, June 1, 2017.

• Bianca Kramer, Scholarly societies - publishing income and costs, a crowd-sourced OA spreadsheet, launched December 2018. It includes (or will include) information on OA, APCs, licensing, and copyright.

• Mikael Laakso, Ways societies are transitioning subscription journals to OA, Scholastica, December 21, 2018.

• David Lewis, Scholarly Societies and the Newspaper Problem, November 2018.

• Tasha Mellins-Cohen and Gaynor Redvers-Mutton, Transformation: the future of society publishing, January 8, 2020 (perma.cc link).

• Kamran Naim, Curtis Brundy, and Rachael G. Samberg, Collaborative transition to open access publishing by scholarly societies, Molecular Biology of the Cell, February 21, 2021 (perma.cc link).

• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). See especially the OASPA page on society publishers.

• Our Research, Spreadsheet of Society Journals, released November 5, 2019. Crowd-sourced and based in part on SOAR data, though not limited to OA journals.

• Heather Piwowar, OA Options For A Society Journal, Research Remix, May 11, 2013.

• Seb Schmoller, Journal tendering for societies: a brief guide, Association for Learning Technology, February 15, 2013.

• Stuart Sheiber, Why Open Access is better for Societies, The Occasional Pamphlet, January 29, 2013.

• Patricia Soranno, Why Should Societies Embrace Open Access? An Editor’s Perspective, Wiley Exchanges, October 24, 2017.

• Jan Velterop, Should scholarly societies embrace open access (or is it the kiss of death)? Learned Publishing, July 1, 2003.

• Transitioning Society Publications to OA (TSPOA). Launched February 2019.

• Wellcome Trust, Helping learned societies explore Plan S-compliant business models, November 2018. A call for tenders from the Wellcome Trust, UKRI, and ALPSP to undertake a study on how society publishers could comply with Plan S.

• Astrid van Wesenbeeck and Frederick Friend, Scholarly Society Journals in Transition to Open Access, Knowledge Exchange, September 2011.

• John Willinsky, Scholarly Associations and the Economic Viability of Open Access Publishing, Journal of Health Sciences Policy, April 8, 2015.

• Alicia Wise and Lorraine Estelle, Learned Societies, the key to realising an open access future? LSE Impact Blog, June 24, 2019.

• Alicia Wise and Lorraine Estelle, Society Publishers Accelerating Open Access and Plan S - Final Project Report, Information Power, September 12, 2019. Also see the press release.

For real-time news and comment on the topic of society publishers and OA, follow the oa.societies tag at the Open Access Tracking Project. (This tag library is crowd-sourced, and you can make it more complete by taking part in the OATP.) Here some related tag libraries for boolean searches on OATP tags:

• oa.societies AND oa.journals
• oa.societies AND oa.conversions
• oa.societies AND oa.business_models