Inter-Research has long recognised the high value of open research to furthering the aims of science. The process of converting all 8 Inter-Research journals to fully Open Access (OA) publication began in 2013. By the end of 2020, 4 titles had already “flipped” to fully OA.

From January 1, 2021, the 4 journals published by Inter-Research that still have a subscription component:

are designated as Transformative Journals. Inter-Research welcomes the opportunity provided by cOAlition S and other funders to continue the fully OA conversion process. If funder support proves viable, OA-flipping of all titles should be complete by end of 2024.

What are the advantages of publishing Open Access?

OA articles attract far more attention than non-OA articles, in some cases more than 10-fold. OA articles are immediately available to a much broader audience, including the general public. This potentially results in a wider and greater impact and faster citation growth. Our OA articles are published under the Creative Commons by Attribution v.4.0 License (CC-BY). The original copyright holders (usually the authors) retain the copyright. The article can be freely reproduced provided the original authors, published source, and CC-BY License are acknowledged.

What is a Transformative Journal?

A Transformative Journal is a hybrid or subscription journal that is committed to transitioning into a fully Open Access journal, by increasing its OA content year-on-year, flipping to fully OA publication when the OA content reaches 75%.

Are the Transformative Journals Plan S compliant?

The 4 IR hybrid journals (MEPS, AME, DAO CR) are presently registered with cOAlition S as Transformative Journals and are thus Plan S compliant. To maintain cOAlition S registration, the journals must:

Demonstrate an annual increase in the proportion of Open Access research content of at least 5% in absolute terms and at least 15% in relative terms, year-on-year, and publish these on its website;

Implement transparent pricing for the OA APC and offset subscription income from APC payments;

Provide data on the usage, citations and online attention of the published articles;

Provide an annual public report to cOAlition S, to be also made accessible on the journals’ public website.

Plan S Transformative Journals 2021 progress report and 2022 targets

Open Access penetration targets

The Open Access 2021 penetration targets (see table below) were exceeded by 3 of the 4 Transformative Journals.

The final volume of the 2021 subscription year of Climate Research originally scheduled for publication in December 2021 was unavoidably delayed until January 2022. As the whole issue was Open Access, had it been published when originally scheduled, Climate Research would have met its 2021 target (Plan S calculations are based on publication within Calendar Year). On this basis, an application has been made to Plan S for an exception to be applied to Climate Research to retain its Transformative Journal status for 2022.

Note: Only studies reporting original research are valid under Plan S. This includes the Inter-Research categories ‘Research Article’ and ‘Note’ and excludes ‘Review Article’, ‘Opinion Piece’, ‘Comment’ and ‘Reply Comment’, and editorial content such as ‘Introduction’, ‘Editorial’, and ‘Obituary’. Thus the data reported in the table does not represent the full number of articles published in a year.

* Based on the same total number of Research Articles published in 2021. The target will likely change as its value is based on the actual number of articles published.

With no limits or barriers in place except the Article Processing Charge (APC), achieving these targets to “OA flip” the journals and the ongoing viability of the fully OA publication model is largely dependent on the desire of funders to have Open Access publication and their ability to support the payment of APCs.

Transformative Journal performance metrics

Real-time data from CrossRef on article citations can be obtained by clicking on the “Cited by” button at the bottom of the web abstract page for each article. Work on providing access to usage and online attention data at the individual article level is still in progress.

In the meantime, we provide average usage metrics (downloads, citations and altmetric scores; as at mid-May 2022) per Research Article published in 2021 for each journal (see table below). Across all 4 journals, for OA content vs. Subscriber content, average metrics are: Downloads: 549.2 vs. 32.4; Citations: 4.7 vs. 3.1; Altmetric scores: 7.0 vs. 3.5. These clearly demonstrate that OA content gets more attention than subscriber content soon after publication.

Pricing transparency

Information on setting the APC price and its contribution to the work that is done on each manuscript during the review and publication process is in preparation and its completion is aligned with the 31 October 2022 deadline for publishers to have registered with the cOAlition S Journal Comparison Service.

In 2021, Inter-Research introduced a subscription pricing model for the hybrid journals accounting for the change in the proportion of articles published with OA. The detailed model is given on the Subscription Information webpage, and its effect on the pricing between 2021 and 2022 for each title can be found by clicking on the relevant title tab on that page. The model will be updated for 2023 pricing the end of August 2022.