De Gruyter Brill has announced a series of new agreements and initiatives aimed at advancing open access publishing across journals and books, including expanded support for diamond open access models, new transformative agreements, and the continuation of Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) transitions.
As part of its diamond open access expansion, De Gruyter Brill has added five new journals to the model in 2025, with further additions expected in 2026. Under the diamond OA model, journals are both free to read and free to publish in, with funding sourced through collaborations with libraries, funders, authors, and scholarly societies. This model is increasingly seen as a viable route for open access in disciplines where traditional author-pays mechanisms are less feasible, such as the humanities and social sciences.
In scholarly book publishing, the Max Planck Digital Library has extended its agreement with De Gruyter Brill to fund open access book titles. Authors affiliated with the Max Planck Society can now continue to publish open access monographs and edited volumes through this arrangement. As of 2024, De Gruyter Brill has published over 500 new open access books, bringing its total open access book output to more than 5,000 titles.
The publisher also plans to transition an additional 58 journals to open access via the Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) model in 2025. This model supports the shift from subscription-based access to open access through the continued renewal of institutional subscriptions, removing the need for author-facing article processing charges. By leveraging existing subscription infrastructure, S2O offers a transitional mechanism that preserves revenue stability while expanding access.
In parallel, De Gruyter Brill has entered into 13 new transformative agreements with academic institutions and consortia. These include agreements with SIKT (the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research), the JULAC consortium in China, the University of Erfurt in Germany, and several institutions in the United States. These agreements provide both publishing and reading access to affiliated researchers and are designed to facilitate the transition of hybrid journals to full open access.
Together, these developments reflect the publisher’s growing reliance on a combination of institutional agreements and alternative funding models to support the ongoing shift toward open access dissemination. The current strategy emphasizes diversified models to address the structural, financial, and disciplinary complexities of open access publishing.
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