Taylor & Francis Announces Open Access Collective Funding Pilot

Collective Pathway to Open Publishing will support authors to publish OA using a combination of funding sources

A new Taylor & Francis pilot aims to support open access (OA) publishing using a combination of existing funding sources, enabling authors of every article type to choose OA at no cost.

Collective Pathway to Open Publishing (CPOP) has been designed as an OA solution for Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) journals, especially those focused on regions with a high uptake of OA agreements.

Collective funding

CPOP builds on the success of Taylor & Francis’ OA (Read & Publish) agreements, which now help researchers at over 1,000 institutions to publish OA. Some HSS journals with author communities in regions where agreements are common now publish most of their articles OA. However, meeting the criteria for conversion to a full OA journal under an Article Publishing Charge (APC) model remains a challenge due to limited OA funding in HSS fields for articles not covered by an agreement.

CPOP aims to solve this challenge by combining funding from OA agreements with ‘read’ income from subscriptions and other reading access fees. Through CPOP these funding sources can be used collectively to support the journal’s conversion to OA, one volume at a time, without any APCs.

Emily Farrell, Global Commercial Director for Open Research at Taylor & Francis, explained: “OA agreements are already the main source of funding for some regional journals. Through CPOP we will put the remaining read income the journals receive towards OA publishing of all additional articles by authors at institutions without an agreement. This will give our partners the collective opportunity to make the whole volume of a journal OA, simply by renewing their read agreement or continuing to approve articles to be published OA through their open access agreement.”

If thresholds are met, all 2025 articles in the pilot journals will be published OA, making them available to readers everywhere. The process can then be repeated for 2026. If the required level of backing is not achieved by a pilot title, it will remain a subscription journal (with a hybrid OA option).

Piloting CPOP on Nordic research journals

Strong support for Taylor & Francis OA agreements has been established in Nordic countries through partnerships with all the main library consortia. As a result, more than 70% of articles published each year in the two CPOP pilot journals, Nordic Psychology and Nordic Social Work Research, are open access. If CPOP thresholds are hit, the remaining portion of new articles can also be made OA in 2025.

Professor Klaus Nielsen, Editor-in-Chief of Nordic Psychology, said: “Over recent years it has been wonderful to see an increasing percentage of Nordic Psychology articles published open access, with a corresponding effect on their international reach and impact. We’re excited to see whether this new pilot will be the answer for those last few articles that don’t currently benefit from an OA agreement.”

Supporting all article types

CPOP is expected to particularly benefit specialist and professional content, such as book reviews, systematic reviews and articles by practitioners. Although these are a key feature of many HSS journals, they are not usually included in OA agreements, unlike research articles.

Jessica Vivian, Humanities & Social Sciences Publishing Director at Taylor & Francis, said: “I’m delighted we are introducing a model that allows authors of all content to realize the benefits of publishing open access. In particular, to have non-research content being published OA, which is so valuable in HSS fields but rarely eligible for OA funding, will give a real boost to its availability for a much broader readership.”

CPOP is one of a range of creative new ideas being trialed by Taylor & Francis to accelerate OA publishing. This includes Subscribe to Open, a separate pilot for OA journals announced in October, and Pledge to Open, Taylor & Francis’ collaborative funding initiative for OA books.