Taylor & Francis has unveiled a new pilot initiative called the Collective Pathway to Open Publishing (CPOP), designed to enhance open access (OA) publishing opportunities for authors in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) fields. This groundbreaking pilot leverages a blend of existing funding sources to support OA without requiring Article Publishing Charges (APCs), enabling authors to publish OA at no cost.
While Taylor & Francis’ OA agreements have successfully facilitated OA publishing for over 1,000 institutions worldwide, the HSS sector has struggled to transition fully to OA models due to limited funding. Many HSS journals, particularly those in regions with strong OA agreements, publish a significant portion of their content openly. However, converting these journals entirely to OA under traditional APC models has remained a challenge, as HSS fields often lack the financial support available to STEM disciplines.
The CPOP initiative aims to address this gap by creatively combining revenue from OA agreements with income generated from subscriptions and other access fees. This collective funding strategy allows journals to convert to OA one volume at a time. If specific financial thresholds are reached, all articles in the 2025 volumes of the pilot journals will be published OA. The process can then be replicated for subsequent years, such as 2026. If a journal fails to meet the required funding levels, it will continue as a subscription journal with a hybrid OA option.
The pilot program will initially focus on two HSS journals: Nordic Psychology and Nordic Social Work Research, which have a strong base of OA agreements in the Nordic region. Thanks to partnerships with major library consortia in these countries, more than 70% of articles published annually in these journals are already available OA. With the implementation of CPOP, Taylor & Francis aims to extend OA coverage to include the remaining articles by 2025, if the funding thresholds are achieved.
The CPOP model is particularly advantageous for content types that typically fall outside the scope of traditional OA agreements, such as book reviews, systematic reviews, and practitioner-authored articles. These contributions are vital to HSS scholarship but have often been left behind in the transition to OA publishing.
CPOP is one of several innovative initiatives by Taylor & Francis aimed at accelerating the shift towards open access. Alongside this pilot, the company has introduced Subscribe to Open, a program announced in October, and Pledge to Open, a collaborative funding initiative designed to expand OA publishing for books.
Taylor & Francis continues to explore new approaches to support the global research community in making academic knowledge more accessible. As CPOP gains momentum, it could set a precedent for other HSS journals to transition fully to OA, enabling broader dissemination of specialized content and promoting greater inclusivity in scholarly publishing.
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