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Non-profits Navigating the Storm: How Non-APC Models are Becoming a Lifeline for Non-profit Publishing Sustainability
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Non-profits Navigating the Storm: How Non-APC Models are Becoming a Lifeline for Non-profit Publishing Sustainability
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Segment:0 .
Ooh, good afternoon, everyone. None of you were supposed to come to this. We were like 130 after on a Friday. It will be just like a small group. It'll be intimate know No pressure. But you all came and we're delighted. So good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sarah rouhi.
I head up open science at the American Institute of Physics publishing, AIP publishing, and I am delighted to basically invite all of you to a conversation that I've been wanting to have with my co-panelists here at the table around New business models and where we are given everything that's going on. I cannot remember when we had to submit proposals for this, but I feel like it was in the before times, so we're not in those times anymore.
And so I want to couch how we're going to do the session in light of that transition. So code of conduct, please remember this. I mean, I expect everyone can do this, but don't forget the code of conduct. So these are the three questions we want to center the discussion around. We're each going to identify ourselves, introduce ourselves, answer these three questions within the context of our organizations.
And then we want to have an open discussion. So as soon as we've done with that, I'm going to be down there with a microphone, going around with questions and hopefully keeping this interactive since we are all sort of food coma ING and the last sessions of the day here. So just some scene setting. When I had the pleasure of working with Jon at Plas on new business models with Lauren and Scott have been doing business models before I have it was the post during and post COVID period.
The UNESCO open science recommendation came out in 2021 and there seemed to be this collective agreement, at least in our community, that we were all driving towards an equitable, open science future where open access was going to remain the priority. Funders were driving a lot of the mandates and urgency around that, and we were agreed that this is a challenging future. We're working towards.
But there's a shared commitment that given the collective global trauma we just experienced, openness, starting with access had to be a priority irrespective of your positionality within the scholarly communications ecosystem. So that felt not trivial, but manageable. And I laugh now at a keynote that I gave in the fall of last year with Silverchair, where I was talking with our CEO about how we're so lucky in this industry because the pace of change is relatively slow, and we have time to really think through how we're going to handle some of these big paradigm shifts.
But then the current times happened, and this is not an industry that I would posit. And I welcome debate on this, that handles change particularly well and frankly, hasn't really been hit by that much that has required deep structural change. And so now the words I would use to describe what the period is right now would be unprecedented. Not just attacks on science, but attacks on the things that we consider core to what our business is and our missions are.
We do assume that there are truth, that there are ways of assessing truth, that facts are predicates for how we disseminate information and what information we disseminate, that not all truth is alternate. You can't pick and choose. So we have standards. We believe in standards. So all of those attacks on those sort of norms that we took for granted for a really long time are unprecedented.
It's confusing because at the moment, the language that we use to demonstrate the value of our work is now being co-opted in ways that perhaps we weren't used to. I mean, I was telling John before, if you take a look at the journal run by Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the NIH. If you look at the journal for the Academy of public health. The editorials on best practice and publishing could have been written by Fellows.
They could have been written by center for open science. So it is confusing to hear the language that we have touted for years as the bedrock of what we do now being co-opted, weaponized. We can debate what those things mean in the context of the work that we do. And then all of this is happening while a massive paradigm shift unrelated to a lot of this is happening around technology, which alone would have been massively disruptive for us without the current moment that we're in, so unprecedented, confusing, dislocating.
And then I think the piece that is going to make or break us as we work through this period is really the lack of alignment amongst the various stakeholders that move this scholarly endeavor together moving forward. To that end, I always like to know who's in the room. So how many people and you can raise your hand multiple times here. How many people where a librarian hat at least some of the time.
Awesome How many people wear a publisher hat like me. That's because we got a lot of how many people wear an editorial hat. How many people wear like an operations hat. How many people wear like a business development sales commercial hat. How many people wear a funder hat from time to time. Vendors vendor hats. OK, so we have a mix of stakeholders here.
I think if you were to do a blind vote, we would align roughly on what we think the mission of both our organizations and our industry is trying to do. And then we would immediately sit down around a coffee or a beer and realize that the thing that I need to happen is probably actually making the thing that you need to happen harder to do half the time.
So all of that is meant to be seen setting for the conversation I want to have today, because the answer to these three questions for me is a little different now than it would have been like when I pitched this panel to all of you. So what I'm going to ask each of us to do is answer these questions in the before times context. And then I'd like the discussion, if it's of interest to the room, to re-examine these in the context of what we know now, what our organizations are trying to navigate as things get pretty crazy for us.
Does that work for everyone. Cool all right, so with that, can I turn it over to you, Scott. Introduce yourself. Answer your questions. Is that on. Is that on. That's on. Great hi, everyone.
Thanks for being here. I'm Scott delman. I'm ACM's director of publications. ACM is the Association for computer science. And so actually it's ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery. We don't really use the word machinery too much anymore, but we're serving the computer science community as an association.
Just very quickly, before I answer Sarah's questions, let me tell you a little bit about what we are and what we do as an association. We do three main things. We are a member organization with about 110,000 members from over 100 countries around the world. We are a scholarly publisher. We're publishing journals. We are publishing books.
We're publishing magazines. We're publishing conference proceedings of typically peer reviewed conference literature conferences in computing. And we are, I think, probably the world's largest scholarly computer science conference organizer. So about 200 conferences a year going on under the ACM banner. And we also serve as a publisher of about 300 conferences that we don't own and operate, but we provide publishing services and hosting services in our digital library.
So that's a little bit about who we are. We publish 70 journals, probably something on the order of 70,000 to 80,000 authors a year. Last year, we published 38,000 peer reviewed research articles. Just so you get a sense of the scale of what we are and what we do. OK, so to Sarah's first question, why did we launch our model. Our model is called ACM open.
This is an institutional model. I'll give you some details about that in a few minutes. But we launched this back in January of 2020. We started building the model, developing it in collaboration with some universities, predominantly in the United States, but with input from universities around the world. And we started that development process in 2018 and formally launched at the end of January of 2020.
And right after we launched that, a couple of things happened. The first is that COVID hit and that hit in March of 2020. So my one advice to all of you publishers out there before you're going to launch a major model that's going to shake up your entire business and organization. Don't do it before a major pandemic. Bad idea. Strongly disagree.
OK yeah. I'll come back. All right. I'll come back. Great second thing that happened is a group of very prominent, about 1,500 computer scientists in our community signed a change.org petition urging ACM. I would probably say, demanding that ACM go 100% open access immediately.
Just basically take down the subscription paywall to our digital library. Those two factors were kind of instrumental in what we were doing, and obviously we couldn't just take down the paywall for, I would hope, obvious reasons. But those petitions led to a lot of internal discussions, discussions with our community, with our volunteers. ACM is very much driven as a volunteer organization. Our leadership, our board of directors, like most nonprofits, are really driven by the community itself.
And ultimately, in June of 2020, the organization decided that it was going to respond to that change.org petition by agreeing to set a deadline to commit to full 100% open access by the end of 2025, which is fast approaching. So we had a model in place that we just launched earlier in the year. We were starting to get some traction with that model, but still really early days, really uncertain.
Fast forward five years. We are about six or seven months out from that full transition, and probably when we get into some of the Q&A, I'll talk a little bit more about sustainability, which is probably the key issue for us, and I think probably for all the publishers in the room, sustainability is a huge issue and probably one of the barriers that most organizations have to transitioning to this full open access.
But we're committed. As of today, our board of directors, what we call the ACM council, has taken four votes every six months. They take a vote, and they reaffirm their commitment to actually flipping to 100% open access at the end of this year. OK, second question. What is the model.
How does it work. So unlike subscribe to open unlike some of the other models that are out there. Our model is what we call an institutional unlimited read and unlimited publish model. So that means that we are not charging either institutions or authors for every single article they publish. The model is based on a tiering system. It's 10 pricing tiers.
Those tiers are based on historical publishing output from the institution. So we look to the mechanics of it are that we look at the affiliated corresponding authors of each of the articles that we publish, we look at where those authors are affiliated with. And that's one article counted towards that institution. We then take an average of the three most recent calendar years.
We look at a table that we've created based on data. And that places an institution into a tier. Tier 1 being the largest, tier 10 being the smallest. Tier 10 is any institution that publishes 0 to three articles a year. The largest is any institution publishing 75 or more articles a year. So that just gives you a sense by the numbers. And probably this is also one of the big challenges that we've had.
And we'll continue to have the top one third of our customers. The institutions that publish a lot are being asked to pay more than yes, more than what they were asked to pay when they were just subscribing or reading content, downloading content. The bottom 2/3 that don't actively either publish with us as much are paying the same or less. And so that's fundamental. Dynamic with the model itself.
So that's the basic model authors can publish if they can get into through peer review into any of our journals or conferences or magazines. There is no cap on those numbers. And then at the end of what is typically a 3, four or five year license, the institutions will come back to us for a renewal. We'll look at their three years of most recent data. That will determine whether they stay in the same tier or move up or down the tier.
And that's how the model works. Last question. What do I see as the tensions among stakeholders. I would say there's one tension. It's money. Everyone universally agrees within our community, whether it's the authors, which, by the way, is another curious to see if there are any authors in the room.
I see one author. Great I would say authors generally have been pushing us very hard for open access. They want open access. They want the benefits of open access, which I imagine we'll talk a little bit about later on. Librarians, generally speaking, want open access. Money is always the issue. Authors want open access.
They don't want to pay APCs. That's the other issue. And then I would say the departments the administrators would like open access. The benefits of open access. Good for the departments, good for the universities. But again, it's always a budgetary issue. So those are the three big issues for me. On to you.
Thank you. Thanks, Scott. Afternoon, everybody. My name is John Edwards. I'm from plus. Plus is a non-profit, mission driven organization. And we're closely engaged around advancing open science. And we're trying to do that via changes to research, publishing, research, policy, and research practice.
We started with APCs, and we still use APCs to cover the costs of publishing content open access in our 14 journals. So many, recognize that the APC reinforces existing inequities in the system. So we really, really want to move away from it. And I think our role in possibly or small role in cementing the APC as such a commonly used mechanism means that we have a really important role in suggesting alternatives.
And so we're really trying to lead in doing that. We're thinking about this across kind of multiple fronts and multiple projects. But we have two non APC business models currently in operation. I'm going to talk about one of them today, and one of the reasons we launched them is, of course, to enable institutions to provision open access publishing services for their faculty. And engage with models that support equitable goals and take down really important barriers.
But I think we also see ourselves as an organization that's trying to affect wider change. So we're thinking about local institutional contexts of this model, but we're also trying to affect wider change in the ecosystem. So there's two dual purposes, I think. I'm going to talk about community action publishing which is a transparent cost recovery business model with collective action elements to it.
We set and make public cost recovery targets for the three journals that are sustained by this business model. And that cost recovery target is the cost to place to publish that journal. And we add 10% margin to that value. And that's our cost recovery target. And an institution's price to participate in. The business model is determined by their publishing history.
And we count corresponding author affiliations, but we also count contributing author affiliations, which is a really important point. And their price to participate is directly related to that cost recovery target. So we don't think about APCs when we're thinking about price to participate. It is directly in relation to our recouping that cost recovery target.
Now, I mentioned it's a collective action model, and the collective part of it is that if participants reach and exceed the cost recovery target that we have set, we return money to participants in a subsequent year of participation. So there is a collective interest in everybody participating and continuing to participate and to reach that cost recovery target, because it means that next year's participation will be slightly cheaper in terms of updates and how it's going.
I mean, the models are conceived to run in multiyear cycles, and we've just reached the end of cycle 1. So we're at an interesting point in reflecting on how it's gone. And participation has kind of fluctuated year on year a little bit, but we have seen it go in the right direction. And our ambition really is that the majority of revenue for these journals would be provided by participation in this model, and we're now at a really good place where approximately 50% of the revenue from these journals is provided by this model, which is fantastic.
So going into cycle 2, we have set new cost recovery targets, which we do at this juncture. And we're trying to keep the pricing as consistent as possible. But an institution's price to participate may change based on their publishing activity. During the period that we assess in terms of tensions, I think it's really interesting to think about this. And one thing I keep coming back to which I've bought a lot of people with already this week, so sorry if you've heard me say this, but I think we see a lot of institutions making APAC driven assessments about their participation in a non APAC model now.
And it's like there's an irony to that. But there's a real tension there. And I think that speaks to the fact that as a publisher we're putting out we're putting mechanics of this model out there. We're setting pricing. We're conceptualizing the concept of it. But what we also need to do is put out really, really clear method for people to assess their participation in it, because I think libraries really struggle with that.
And I don't think, well, we know that comparison to an APC driven assessment is not going to provide them with a helpful answer. And we understand why people use that internally at institutions. But I think we really need to try and move away from that. And I think the role of the publisher in helping institutions to do that is so clear. So we're doing a lot of thinking about what that looks like moving forward.
What does that look like. I mean, let me just share a couple of immediate thoughts, really. I think a lot of it comes down to trying to conceptualize a true Service Partnership between a publisher and an institution. And I think it's about trying to build up trust between those two parties, which I think has been eroded a huge amount over the years.
But it's about building up a very real understanding that the pricing and the basis for these models is fair, and I don't think that's about total transparency. I'm not sure that's the way to go, but I think it's transparency with a really clear purpose to establish and build up that trust over time. It's interesting that we make the cost recovery targets public. As I said.
But we don't have institutions asking us for a line by line breakdown of what goes into them. People don't want to go there, and I'm not sure what they would do with that information if we gave it to them. So I think it's about thinking really strategically about the transparency that we provide and making sure it contributes to that trust that we're really trying to foster.
Over to you, Lauren. Yeah hi, I'm Lauren Kane. I'm the CEO of one. One is a publisher, Library Collective, a 501(c)(3 organization. And so we've kind of been dealing with that. Tensions between stakeholders is very much part of our DNA. But when we say tensions, it's also the same opportunities or the same goals, which I think is sustainability of independent non-profit publishing.
And so for us, we have 150 different societies, museums, independent presses, publishers of 225 journals in the biological sciences. Most of these societies and most of these journals are small. Many of them are regional. Many of them would not survive without the sustaining revenue from bioone complete. It is also our view that these are. Many of them are not the natures.
They're not the sciences, but they are the building blocks of what we do. And there is absolute value. We believe in the bibliodiversity of what groups like bioone publish. So the real tension here has always been we all believe in open access. We share that mission. Our libraries share that mission.
Our publishers, societies, the research creators, the authors all want to have that content be open access. But it has to of course, be sustainable. And for an aggregation, this was a really hard nut to crack. Some of the complexities were that we could not make a decision for our content. Very jealous of publishers that can make the decision to just say unilaterally, this is best. We're going to do this for the content that we provide.
Even if we wanted to be that prescriptive, we would not have been able to. Since the individual societies that work with bio one retain the rights to adopt whatever business models and business practices that they so choose. So we needed a solution that was going to be able to operate within a mixed model context, where bio one complete, our chief product would be subscribed, it would be a subscribe conventional titles, it would be fully gold open access titles, and it would be this third bucket that we were long looking into.
What would this be. How can we create a community open access solution. And so it's been a really long runway for us. We started this journey, I think, in 2022 or in many ways before thinking about this, working with our libraries, working with our publishers about common goals. And ultimately, we decided to adopt a subscribe to open model. And this first model again, we've been working on this for quite some time, will actually launch in 2026, in January will be our first term year.
And so what this means, why this has taken us so long to achieve, is that we went out to our publishers the last couple of years, giving them the opportunity to sign on to this pilot, and it was a huge educational endeavor of what we were trying to achieve. And although they certainly wanted to have an open access future, the biggest thing that kind of had held them back in the past and that they were looking to achieve through this pilot was also revenue sustainability.
So the answer that we heard time and time again. Is open access. Great, but we still need to continue to receive that sustaining Royalty. That is the reason we are able to keep publishing, keep producing our mission. So if we can do those things together, then great. Sign us up. So again, in collaboration with our libraries, about 75% of ones supporting libraries come through consortia.
And so we did a lot of consultation with our supporting consortia. And they were really the drivers to look at the Subscribe to open model lyricists and many others were really pivotal for us to in making this selection. So ultimately, the pilot is going to include 74 titles or 71 titles from 54 societies. Again, this will launch in 2026 and subscribe to open is conditional open access.
So what this means is that if bio one reaches our revenue target for 2026 and the revenue target roughly, will be that we earn the same amount of sustaining revenue that we have earned in the past, which as a nonprofit enterprise is basically what we need to returned those same sustaining royalties to the publishers while also maintaining the operations of one. If we are able to do that, then the content for this pilot group will current volume be open.
If we do not meet our revenue target, then it will be business as usual. Those titles will remain gated. The titles that are not in the pilot again, business as usual. Conventional scribe gated. So it's really an opportunity, although there's a lot of complexity with subscribe to open. In essence, this really is a simple switch and it's the simplicity of that, I think, has been appealing to our community, the ability to go open access while retaining that sustaining revenue.
So in terms of the tensions of what we're seeing. I honestly would argue that there is less tensions for us, at least in now that we have adopted this model, or at least what we're seeing so far than what we did before. Because heading out the last few years, we were certainly under a lot of pressure, especially from our library community, especially from our consortia community, to have an answer, to open access, to have an answer for these small societies that wanted to adopt an open access approach and to do it through a partner like bioone.
So while I certainly agree with my co-panelists that there's inherently tensions between all of these stakeholder groups for us subscribe to open in this model has been a way to really bridge that gap and to provide that common ground between revenue, sustainability and an open path. So one of the reasons I wanted to convene this group is that each of these organizations have been down this path, and it sounds like you're all at these great milestone marks.
So congratulations on the announcement in 2026 for bio one. That is not trivial. The amount of work that I'm sure went into that for cap to now be three years through its cycle is an incredible achievement. And then for you guys to get to 2025 and have done it, I mean, nobody thought you were going to do it well.
I won't jinx it, but it's such an achievement. And I say that because AIP publishing is at the beginning of this process. And it was one of the reasons I was excited. It's a very different context. You guys are dealing entirely APCs. Moving to a B2B approach. You're dealing with many, many small folks trying to cat Herd. You're dealing with a commitment that is make or break.
You either do it or you don't. Our context is very similar to the other non-for-profit publishers where we have a commitment to our parent that is non-negotiable. We have to provide that to enable their mission. We have a complex range of models that we're currently trying to balance to recognize the fact that the geographic diversity of needs in terms of how we make our content available is varied.
And then we have our internal systems and cultures and ways of working that are used to a legacy subscription business that was very stable and very effective. So our approach, looking into what open science is going to mean in the physical sciences, which is a very different conversation than in the biomedical context, is what are going to be the steps to a sort of pragmatic, researcher focused open science. And for us, the first piece was we've got to figure out getting more of our content open more quickly, and we've got to reduce the APC barrier as the means to do that.
And so the model that we're looking at now, which we hope to have more detail about in the fall is really around. How do you and you alluded to this, John. So it made my heart sing a little bit. How do you get libraries out of a transactional count. The articles multiplied by some number, and that's what we should pay. And if we get more articles, then that number per Article got lower.
So we'll renew with you. And if we get less articles, that means you're too expensive and we cancel. That sort of transactional thinking is going to put all of us out of business, is going to leave us in a far less diverse economy of publishing, of scholarly publishing, and runs contrary to what the library community and the research community claims it wants.
So how do you break that transactional lens, which is very hard to do and very understandable, and try to shift thinking to a services based model that says, not unlike your gym membership, you pay a monthly fee, you have access to the sauna, the pool, the weights, the cardio. You may never use some of those things, but you have benefit of all of them. And chances are, if you came enough during the year when your membership renews in January, you just let it go through.
And maybe next time you try the spin class. This year you didn't. But you don't look and say, well, I only used cardio and I only used weights. I do not want to pay for the sauna and the pool. Can you make people make that services shift. There's a suite of services. I pay for all of them. I use some of them, hopefully get value from them.
And at the end of the day, I'm not doing an article by Article calculation on how I saw value. And that is not just a business model shift. That is a repositioning of the value of what we do. And so suddenly you're not saying, hey, I sold you ebooks last year and I'd like to upsell you to the archive this year. You're saying that our mission and values is something that you should be supporting, and that probably means you have to make a difficult budget decision about something else.
So we're not just figuring out the math, which is a nightmare. We are also figuring out how do we communicate this in a way that's compelling to a market at a time of crisis. Because when we launch this place and John knows he joined a little bit later, it was at the height of COVID, and I feel like I'm reliving it where we're trying to launch it again at the height of another crisis. And I'm actually really optimistic because nothing concentrates the mind like fear.
And when you have to start making difficult choices in the context of a crisis, you tend to put your money where your priorities are. And so I actually think you guys came out of the gate, plus came out of the gate at a time when people had to make really hard choices. And those organizations came into Marketplace with a really compelling message. So it's more than the math.
The math has to be right. You can't get away from that. And that's one of my questions for you, is how you handle you make a commitment in 2025 if you can't get the math to work on that. What are the impacts for you. And I want to come back to that. But that is the piece that we're trying to figure out. So that's why I'm going over my allowed five minutes.
So with that, let's turn to the group. I'm going to have you guys pass that mic back and forth. And I want to get into the audience because guys can't just sit here. You all need to engage with as well. But Scott. Yeah let me can I start with you on that question. I mean, one of the questions the consortia talked to us about all the time is what's your flip date.
What's your flip date. When are you going to flip fully open. And I'm like, how fast do you want to pay for that. That's always my answer because we can't do that. We can't do that. How the heck did you do that. So let me start by saying sustainability means something different to every publisher, especially in the nonprofit space.
The vast majority of publishers are very small, publishing one journal, publishing a very small book program. The number of midsize to large society publishers or nonprofits or University presses is extremely small. The vast majority is on that long tail, and we have to think about what sustainability means for each of them, for ACM. And we've been extremely transparent about this.
And actually, there are a couple of concepts that have come up, even during the initial remarks that I want to just target here. One is sustainability, one is trust, one is transparency. Sustainability for my organization means that we have to generate about $26 million next year in publishing income. If we don't do that, then there is a real world implication to our staff, to our publications, to our volunteers, to our authors, to the graduate students that we fund to travel to conferences around the world.
And so for us, that's a real number. We have to achieve that. We're not looking from one year to the next. While, of course, we have annual fiscal budgets that we have to achieve. We know what next year's budget is going to be. We know what. We made last year from our subscription based income. We know what.
We made from our open access agreements. We know what. We made from our optional APCs. At the end of the day, if we're not at that $26 million figure next year, we're in trouble. OK, so I'm out of that number. Are institutional agreements non APCs licenses for ACM open generates about $20 million a year. Now that's the level that we're at.
So there's scale here that again repeat that again. What's that. Repeat that last sentence again. $20 million from your existing from our ACM open institutional multiyear licenses that we've now signed on 1900 universities around the world and a bunch of big tech companies. So that figure is out of roughly 25 or 2,600 subscribing institutions historically that generated that kind of income. For us, of course, costs go up every year.
Inflation goes up. So that's a moving target. So that's sustainability transparency. One of the things we heard from our institutional library partners from day one was, if you're going to ask some universities to pay more, you're going to have to tell us how you're using that money. So someone suggested here, we're not going to show every line item that we make.
We actually do we publish an article every year that shows our finances. What does it cost us in journals, production, conference production, our platform. What does it cost us in staff and overhead as aggregate numbers. We're not telling you everybody's salary, but we tell you what we spend on all of those things. Because if you're going to ask libraries that are already crunched for budget to spend more, they have to understand what the value proposition is, and they have to understand exactly how that money is going to be used and that it aligns with their goals.
Trust, I think, is really it can't be understated here. And building up trust in a community and an industry where the large for profit publishers, probably most of us have worked for those over the course of our career has eroded an enormous amount of trust. And there is a big difference between a mission based organization and a for profit publishing organization that's generating 30% 40% 50% profit margins every year. For us, those margins are single digits.
Those numbers are real. We have to achieve those numbers. And if you can share enough, be extremely transparent with those customers, with those partners, they're more likely to want to align with you and support your model, especially at times like this where there's so much uncertainty, how many people hear the transparency thing and they're like shoulders start to go up, get a little stressed.
When I told my CEO and CFO that that's what we were going to have to do, they were like, what. I was like, yeah, we can't engage with this community the way we have in the past. It's a punishment of legacy behaviors and legacy business practices that many of us were not around for. But the outcomes are better if we're willing to engage with those practices. At least I've found.
So I thought for Lauren and for John, I'd really be interested because the trust and the transparency piece are completely intertwined. That to me is where the trust comes from. So in the context of both of your models, can you guys speak to how you've been building that with the community. What's worked, what hasn't. I'm happy to speak about what hasn't if you don't want to.
But if you could speak to that, those pieces fitting together, that would be really interesting and have your questions ready, please. I will come with the mic. I think it's about just having the information out there for us, and it's about giving people an insight so that they don't have to go and do their own sort of independent digging, really. I think it's about making it easy for people to engage with that question.
And I think, as I said, I think it's been striking for us that we haven't had difficult or challenging conversations about the information that we have made transparent. And I think it's just about taking that first step. And I think it is possible to do. I think there's a question behind it. Which is it. It's so difficult for libraries to engage with some of this information.
I still think that's true because it's really difficult to compare these things across publishers. It's impossible to compare it across publishers. The way journal, the business of journals is madly complex in certain ways. And so it's very difficult to unpick and make sense of. So sometimes I think it's taking that first step and being bold enough to say, here's some information we're not afraid of you kind of knowing that.
And engage with us on it. But as I said, and we differ on this, but the share all approach. I kind of question a little bit maybe, but yeah. I've been thinking a lot lately on scientific communication and communication to the general public. And I think we all know as an industry this is an area that we can do better. And we need to do better.
But I think we can also take cues, even within the industry, about how we communicate, what we do and our impact. And I subscribe to open or thinking about open models for bio one has really led to a lot of this type of thinking of OK, to your example, Scott, we need basically $3 million to run bio one the organization, and we need an additional $5 million to return to the publishers. That's roughly what we give in royalties to the bio one publishers each year.
And so as a big number, it's kind of meaningless. So what does that actually translate to. Why is this important. Well, that means that roughly each bio one society is getting, on average about $40,000 a year. Again, doesn't sound like a slightly innocuous number. Seems pretty small to most, but say, the Brazilian Society of herpetology, that $40,040,000 a year is going to keep their publication running.
It is going to make sure that the research they produce, research that is very significant in terms of climate change in that region, in terms of biodiversity conservation, in terms of a number of things that again, contribute to the science of that region and to the greater global challenges that we face. This is why that is important. So to going back to your question about transparency, I absolutely think that transparency in terms of how does the model work, what are the financial figures, how are we using this money.
That's one side of the coin. But I think increasingly the other side of the coin that's equally important is why is this important. Why are these funds important. How is it actually being used. How does this perpetuate the research and the mission. Which is why we're all here. How are we doing on questions.
Anybody ready to jump in yet. Oh, yes. OK let's do Swapna and then backs and then over to Rick. Thanks, Swapna. The Oxford University Press. My question is for Scott. Did you consider what other models did you consider before you landed on the one you did. And if so, why did you decide not to use those.
And the second question is either have you already or are you considering as a plan B, should you not meet your revenue goals. What sort of operational efficiencies you're going to have to implement to make some numbers. So first question, in terms of what other models did we consider when we launched ACM open the way that we did APCs, everyone was talking about PCs. This was very much at the dawn 2018 of transformative agreements.
Read and publish agreements that were APAC driven. One of the partners. In fact, I remember a meeting we were at, our publications board was out in San Francisco, and we invited the Dean of libraries at Uc Berkeley, a guy named Jeffrey mackie-mason, to our meeting to talk about open access and the University of California. They were one of the partners that helped develop that model.
And he was in the middle of let's say, a complex negotiation with a large European publisher and renewing a large deal. And one of the things that he didn't want was another APAC driven model. And so he said, all right, we would like to work with ACM to develop a model that is not APAC driven, so that aligned with what we were hearing from our community that was really based in one of the starting sort of places for open access in the early 90s from the machine learning community.
Open source software development built into the culture of computer scientists. I think really deep seated for decades. I remember in that community, in early 1990s, I was working for another one of those European companies and half the editorial board for my machine learning journal, up, and resigned and started an open access journal at that time. We so APCs were out. We didn't want to work at that time on subscribe to open.
Although there are elements of our model that are aligned with subscribe to open, our model is quite different. I was just always really nervous and in all the market research and discussions we had. Nervous what happens if you get to that next year and the funding isn't there. One of the notes that I took when Lauren was giving her introductory remarks was this concept of conditional open access versus what we view as perpetual open access.
Once you make the commitment that article is open, it's going to be open no matter what, forever. And I wonder, what does that mean conditional and can you take it back and nuts and bolts terms. What does that mean for Creative Commons licensing. What does it mean once you make the decision to open that article, how do you close it again. So those were real pivotal thoughts when we decided on the model that we took.
Can you repeat the second question just I forgot or operational efficiency if you didn't hit your target, what adjustments were you going to have to make. So we're not at that point yet. And I'll tell you a couple of things that we have done. So out of the 26 million I was talking about before, we're at about 20 million are locked into multiyear deals. One of the things that we always have in the back of our minds, and Sarah was talking a little bit about I guess we'll call it BT before times.
The before times. That's the T and the after t. What we don't know is the impact of budget cuts. A significant portion of the articles that we publish out of US based authors are funded by the National Science Foundation. And we all know what's happened with their budgets. So it's really too early to know what the impact of that's going to be.
And how are we going to react if we have, x millions of dollars in cancellations next year, what will that mean. It will mean that we will have to cut back on a range of things, platform expenditures that we're spending, marketing expenditures. One of the things to know about most societies and most publishers is that contrary to popular opinion, most of our costs are fixed costs. They're built in.
There's dollar amount that we spend on our platforms. There's dollar amount that we spend on certain licenses, the rent for our offices. It's not simply a question of you publish less cut back, you cancel journals, you lay off staff. Laying off staff is something that, for ACM is not much of an option. It would be very, very far down the list because we are already an incredibly thin organization.
This is a really actually important point because when you get into that transactional article world, then you are getting into a world where we publish more, we hire more people. We had a bad year. That sort of contraction doesn't. That's not sustainable. And so you want to get into a world where you're not thinking like that for exactly this reason, just a totally random thought that's popped into my head, as you were saying, that one of the consequences of opening more and more of our content.
And now I think as of right now, about 70% of the articles that we publish from our journals and our conferences are open access. As a result of these deals. What we didn't count on was that the licenses that we have with networking companies for our platforms. We pay more when there's more usage of our platforms. And so we actually spent about $1 million more last year connected to networking charges that who would have thought that would be something we actually had to plan for.
And this is where the transparency with the community is so important because as you're iterating, changing the pricing, updating it over time, the expectation is, well, why are you asking for more. And there has to be an education component of this is what we bear as we do more of this. And I think there's a lot of misunderstandings around that. Lauren, I want to let you jump in on some of those. Subscribe to opens without a full subscribe to open tutorial.
There is a community of practice and you should join it if you really want to get the nuts and bolts, but I want to make sure you can address those. Thanks, Sarah, and thanks, Scott for the question, because I think a lot of people probably have the same one. When I spoke about conditional open access, that is how we describe subscribe to open, because if a title is S 2.0, it is not a fully open access title.
It is not a flipped title. It is conditional because in each given term year, if that term is successful, that year's content will be opened. If it's not, it will stay gated and typically. Also the back file always stays gated. So that can be an exclusive benefit for subscribers. So that's the conditionality. But once a title, if there is a successful term offer and that year is open.
So in bio one's case for those titles participating in the pilot in 2026, then that content is forever perpetually open access and carrying a Creative Commons license. So there is no worry about an opening and closing. And there's an extensive FAQ on that site. So there's a lot of people that's thanks. I think it was really interesting, Scott, you saying that it came from the community and whereas I was listening to you talking, Lauren, it was really interesting that there were 43 societies have opted in and 70 something journals, but you've got a lot more journals.
So are there any sort of trends or different types of societies or different signals in those communities that seem to be more ready for this than others. So the great question. Thanks so much. So the question was basically there's interest in the model, but what are the people that are perhaps not choosing the model. Or how are we seeing this evolve over time. Well, in the case of 1, I should have noted that the pilot right now, this is a pilot.
It's an experiment. We're going to see how it works, like anything like good science. And if it's not something that's supported by the community, then we'll look on to other things that it is, then we'll see ways that we can perhaps expand it over time. But for this initial pilot phase, we only offered it to bio one complete publishers that were exclusive to bio one complete, meaning they did not have other partners in the mix.
And there were two reasons for this. One is practical because if you are a title with, say, also partnered with Oxford University Press or with Cambridge or any number of other places, then you are probably tackling the imperatives of revenue, sustainability and open access in other forms. And also for bio one, we wanted to start very targeted. And for those exclusive publishers, they are also the more vulnerable publishers.
They are the ones that on their own, it makes it very difficult for them to pursue an open access path. So of the group that we offered this we actually got about, I think, 95% uptake for the pilot, which we were very impressed by and blown away. But again, just to underscore, this is a learning opportunity for us both for bio.
One of how this will work and in extension, I think, to the whole community of how it might work for others. And I think it's an important piece to highlight here that it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I mean, I think ACM made a really bold choice in its model. But at PLOS it was Title specific with very particular issues that needed to be addressed in the pilot bio one. I think that distinction is really important when organizations are thinking about moving this direction, and I urge you to think about it.
If your organization is not remembering that don't have to go whole hog. And in fact, iterative pilots are probably the better way to go. Really makes sense. Rick hi. So speaking as a librarian, I think it a fundamental fact about how library budgets work that is very often overlooked or deleted is the fact that libraries, sometimes the discourse around these publishing models, seems to be built on the assumption that libraries have a bunch of money that they own, and that they can go out and invest in any way that makes sense to them and is in keeping with their missions.
That's fundamentally wrong. An academic library typically gets three chunks of money every year from its host institution a chunk of money for personnel, a chunk of money for collections and a chunk of money for operations. Those three budget territories are not mutually fungible. I can't use personnel money to buy journals, and I can't use operations money to hire people. The money that the University gives the library for the purpose of purchasing content.
Our collections budget is not money that they give to us and say, go out and find publishers that you like who are doing good, praiseworthy things and support them. That money is given to us for the purpose of buying access to content, and this puts the library in a really, really interesting position. When publishers start moving in a direction of something like subscribe to open, for example, where if I don't send my money to the publisher anymore, I still get access to the content.
Now, there are ways around that. Biodun has created has created sort of a freemium model that makes it easier for the library to answer the question. If you didn't give our money to bio one. What would we stop getting. ACM is putting itself in a very different position whereby the answer to that question is nothing. We would still get access to the content. And then there are publishers like annual reviews that have created what I would call a punitive model, whereby if you don't participate for a couple of years and then the title goes out of open access, you then get charged more than you would have if you had continued to.
And that's fine too. That also gives me a way that I can answer my administration if they ask. But the bottom line question does the library support this publisher's mission. The bottom line question, because the number of wonderful, mission aligned things that the university could support with its money is always going to vastly dwarf the number of things that the institution actually can support.
So thinking as a librarian, as I watch a publisher that I've been paying $100,000 a year for journals switched to an open access model, I have to ask myself, what does the University lose if I stop sending this money to the publisher. And that answer is going to vary very much from model to model. But I can tell you right now that our universe, our library, is turning off the funding spigot to multiple journals every year because it is no longer the case that we have to pay for access to their content.
It's not because we don't love them, not because we don't support them, not because we don't think their mission is fantastic, but it's because we've got other also very important, very mission aligned things that we need to do with that money. Can I got to jump on my hobbyhorse because Rick got to do his hobby horse. And Rick's hobby horse is a really important one. It takes me back to, I think, a fundamental tension that it's irresolvable as far as I can see, because Rick said what Rick said is true, certainly for his own institution.
It's true for a lot of US institutions. It is not the case in Northern Europe. It's not the case in Northern Europe. And if you are getting a big amount of subscription revenue from Northern Europe, you better go on this site and see their negotiating principles. You better go to Bob's site and see their negotiating principles. And if you can't even check the box on that, they're not going to take a meeting with you.
And much of that language is predicated on words. We don't say anymore. It's predicated on certain kinds of practices transparency, inclusivity, all of those things. So you can't even open the door. So I got to go and make a case to Rick, which is an absolutely relevant given his context. I have to make a case to jisc, and then I have to go make a case to Cas in China, which is a completely different thing.
And all the while explaining, well, why are your costs going up. Well, let me tell you what it's like to maintain six different models for a global customer base hobby horse over. But my point is the piloting is key. When we're launching this model in the fall, it is going to be limited to a very specific geography because we do not have the capacity to both test if it works and try to get everybody to do it at the same time.
And everyone walks away unsatisfied with that. But in a way you did it right. If everyone is a little unsatisfied. So rant over, Scott, please go ahead. Yeah, I mean, God, we need like three more hours to get into these things. So first to Rick's comment, which is absolutely brilliant and absolutely spot on for ACM. About two years ago, we started realizing that all those non publishing institutions are generating millions of dollars in income that we need.
And so the sustainability of the overall model depends on those institutions. When we flip to open next year and everything is open that we don't have about 1,000 to 1,500 universities around the world say, well, it's open. So I can spend my money somewhere else. And that's a huge problem. We were lucky and we are lucky, and we'll have to see how this plays out in that.
Our subscription product to what's called the ACM digital library, that's our platform. It's both a full text platform and it's a Scopus like bibliographic database. About 70% of the usage, if you look across all of our customers, comes from the non ACM content that's in the bibliographic database. So one of the things we decided to do late last year, a year out from this transition, was we're actually splitting that database into two databases.
And so there's going to be an open access database called basic. This breaking news. No Well, if you've been to our table, there's some material I haven't been to I've been told good giveaways really good giveaways Steve giveaways. So the basic version is going to have all of our free open access articles.
Everything that ACM publishes about 800,000. Articles plus the premium version is the bibliographic database with all the index. All the functionality. All the new I bells and whistles that are being built in. And that's going to be hopefully the hook for all those institutions. And we can show this is not just what we hope you'll do, but we can show you how you've been using this platform over the years.
And OK, so you're not a publishing institution. There's a subscription product that helps us to round out that sustainability picture. And this piece is actually very important. If your organizations are starting to look at some of these models, you have to find a way and excuse the shorthand to monetize read. You cannot let the institutions that contribute because they're reading but not publishing exit your revenue streams.
I mean, maybe somebody here has managed to do that. But what Scott is describing is the kind of iteration that you have to do to make sure that they stay involved and they understand from us. Again, if they can wear a mission driven hat, that exiting the system and taking that money with them is going to make is going to create a world that they will say they don't like. And again, whether they can balance that with their budget equities is a different question.
But finding a way to keep the read participation is really critical. We have a couple minutes left. I'll just let everyone go down the line, whatever you want to hit in the last two minutes, and then I'll keep an eye out for any last questions while they're going down the line. Well, I just want to I'm going to go off of what was just said, because I do think it's a really important point that Rick just made and that Scott was speaking to, is that we talk a lot about mission.
It's incredibly important to talk about mission, but also this is essentially about business models and business models is about sustainability. So I do agree that we cannot be we cannot exist just on being to use your phrase, Rick. Rick praiseworthy. That's not enough. We will not continue to be sustainable, nor should we. Just by being a good publisher and doing the thing that everyone admires.
If you do not value the content, if you do not value the research that you are receiving and the benefits that you are receiving, then you will not continue to subscribe. That is a truth and that's something we all have to keep in mind in our models if we want these to be replicable, if we want these to be scalable. But I think it's also important to remember that we're all not going into this cold.
We're doing a tremendous amount of research. And while I will be sorry if we lose, say, your institution, I will know that there are hundreds of other institutions that value what we're doing, and that, even more so than value, had put a lot of pressure on us and perhaps on others, to say, if you do not go on this path, then instead you're going to be at more risk of cancellation. So this is, I think, inherent to Sarah's great framing. These are the tensions that we're dealing with, not just tensions around mission, but tensions around the economics of what's important.
So that's why I think it's so important to have conversations like this. And I think it's so important that it might sound reductive, but to take the time and do your research and to talk to your community about ultimately not just what they want, but what are they going to economically value so that these things sustain. Yeah, completely. And I think one other way to conceptualize this is it's about making sure that there is a private benefit alongside the collective good.
And I think making sure that both of those are really sharply defined and that they align with what the institutions are looking for is really, really critical. Because without those, yeah, people aren't we want people to vote with their feet, but they're not going to vote with their feet. If all they do is just feel like it's a good idea, it's got to be a good idea.
It's got to make sense when you look at the numbers, and that's a really challenging conversation. But we've just got to get into that. It's so critical. That's one piece of advice I guess I would offer to other publishers and societies and maybe to some extent to librarians commit. And when I say commit, I think that it's important. It's essential we have to do it.
We have to experiment with different models as libraries. You have to support different models. You have to play around with them. As publishers, you have to experiment. But there does come a point where you have to commit. You have to pick a model or pick a bunch of models and be able to scale those models to your entire organization so that you can generate a significant part of your organization's income, publishing income with those models.
When we started this back in 2013, we offered hybrid. We had maxed out at 5% of the articles. We let authors decide pay an APC if you care about open access, pay an APC. We maxed at 5% And while the decision that my organization made to go 100% in five years was and has been the scariest thing you can possibly imagine, I had a lot of hair at the beginning of that process. It was like flowing, beautiful hair looks so different.
It's a caricature of my former self. It's really funny. So it was only through that commitment, that decision to set a deadline five years, give yourself enough time, but put a stake in the ground and tell the world you're going to do it. And nothing clarifies and focuses schizophrenic organizations where you've got lots of different departments, specialty societies where publishing is one of the things that you do, but you do other things too.
And everybody has competing interests. Nothing clarifies and focuses an organization towards a goal. Until you've taken that decision, you've committed to it. There's a risk there of course, but we're at 70. 70% to 75% of the articles are now sustainable. They're sustainable open access without authors having to pay anything. We never would have gotten there if that decision back in 2020 hadn't been taken, everybody would have just been trying the next thing, trying the next experiment.
The reason I part of the reason that I always ask Scott on these panels is because I don't know why you guys don't talk about this more. I think it's an incredible achievement and you've been hearing some contradictory things. Scott says, put a stake in the ground, commit, make it happen. Lauren's like, no, no, be iterative. Think about your communities. And the annoying answer is it's going to depend on what your organization can tolerate and how much bend you can give.
But the thing I would leave folks with because I learned this at floss and I'm taking advantage of it. Now is any kind of transactional approach to the key partners in this, which are institutions, is not going to work anymore. You have to sit down with these organizations, at least the ones that are moving the needle in terms of where you need to be for sustainability and have an open conversation about these are our challenges.
This is where we can engage, please engage with us. And I have been astonished at the amount of really helpful feedback that we've gotten from the consortia that we need to negotiate with on how to build something that's going to work, both for them and for us. And the amount of to your point, John, you don't have to share everything, but the fact that you're sharing key things that are essential to your business.
There's a trust dynamic there that then allows you to have conversations you never would have had before. So with that, we are over time. A big round of applause for our panelists. Thank you guys so much. One more session left. Get home safely to wherever you're headed and we will see you next time around.
Thanks, everybody.
Segment:0 .
Ooh, good afternoon, everyone. None of you were supposed to come to this. We were like 130 after on a Friday. It will be just like a small group. It'll be intimate know No pressure. But you all came and we're delighted. So good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sarah rouhi.
I head up open science at the American Institute of Physics publishing, AIP publishing, and I am delighted to basically invite all of you to a conversation that I've been wanting to have with my co-panelists here at the table around New business models and where we are given everything that's going on. I cannot remember when we had to submit proposals for this, but I feel like it was in the before times, so we're not in those times anymore.
And so I want to couch how we're going to do the session in light of that transition. So code of conduct, please remember this. I mean, I expect everyone can do this, but don't forget the code of conduct. So these are the three questions we want to center the discussion around. We're each going to identify ourselves, introduce ourselves, answer these three questions within the context of our organizations.
And then we want to have an open discussion. So as soon as we've done with that, I'm going to be down there with a microphone, going around with questions and hopefully keeping this interactive since we are all sort of food coma ING and the last sessions of the day here. So just some scene setting. When I had the pleasure of working with Jon at Plas on new business models with Lauren and Scott have been doing business models before I have it was the post during and post COVID period.
The UNESCO open science recommendation came out in 2021 and there seemed to be this collective agreement, at least in our community, that we were all driving towards an equitable, open science future where open access was going to remain the priority. Funders were driving a lot of the mandates and urgency around that, and we were agreed that this is a challenging future. We're working towards.
But there's a shared commitment that given the collective global trauma we just experienced, openness, starting with access had to be a priority irrespective of your positionality within the scholarly communications ecosystem. So that felt not trivial, but manageable. And I laugh now at a keynote that I gave in the fall of last year with Silverchair, where I was talking with our CEO about how we're so lucky in this industry because the pace of change is relatively slow, and we have time to really think through how we're going to handle some of these big paradigm shifts.
But then the current times happened, and this is not an industry that I would posit. And I welcome debate on this, that handles change particularly well and frankly, hasn't really been hit by that much that has required deep structural change. And so now the words I would use to describe what the period is right now would be unprecedented. Not just attacks on science, but attacks on the things that we consider core to what our business is and our missions are.
We do assume that there are truth, that there are ways of assessing truth, that facts are predicates for how we disseminate information and what information we disseminate, that not all truth is alternate. You can't pick and choose. So we have standards. We believe in standards. So all of those attacks on those sort of norms that we took for granted for a really long time are unprecedented.
It's confusing because at the moment, the language that we use to demonstrate the value of our work is now being co-opted in ways that perhaps we weren't used to. I mean, I was telling John before, if you take a look at the journal run by Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the NIH. If you look at the journal for the Academy of public health. The editorials on best practice and publishing could have been written by Fellows.
They could have been written by center for open science. So it is confusing to hear the language that we have touted for years as the bedrock of what we do now being co-opted, weaponized. We can debate what those things mean in the context of the work that we do. And then all of this is happening while a massive paradigm shift unrelated to a lot of this is happening around technology, which alone would have been massively disruptive for us without the current moment that we're in, so unprecedented, confusing, dislocating.
And then I think the piece that is going to make or break us as we work through this period is really the lack of alignment amongst the various stakeholders that move this scholarly endeavor together moving forward. To that end, I always like to know who's in the room. So how many people and you can raise your hand multiple times here. How many people where a librarian hat at least some of the time.
Awesome How many people wear a publisher hat like me. That's because we got a lot of how many people wear an editorial hat. How many people wear like an operations hat. How many people wear like a business development sales commercial hat. How many people wear a funder hat from time to time. Vendors vendor hats. OK, so we have a mix of stakeholders here.
I think if you were to do a blind vote, we would align roughly on what we think the mission of both our organizations and our industry is trying to do. And then we would immediately sit down around a coffee or a beer and realize that the thing that I need to happen is probably actually making the thing that you need to happen harder to do half the time.
So all of that is meant to be seen setting for the conversation I want to have today, because the answer to these three questions for me is a little different now than it would have been like when I pitched this panel to all of you. So what I'm going to ask each of us to do is answer these questions in the before times context. And then I'd like the discussion, if it's of interest to the room, to re-examine these in the context of what we know now, what our organizations are trying to navigate as things get pretty crazy for us.
Does that work for everyone. Cool all right, so with that, can I turn it over to you, Scott. Introduce yourself. Answer your questions. Is that on. Is that on. That's on. Great hi, everyone.
Thanks for being here. I'm Scott delman. I'm ACM's director of publications. ACM is the Association for computer science. And so actually it's ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery. We don't really use the word machinery too much anymore, but we're serving the computer science community as an association.
Just very quickly, before I answer Sarah's questions, let me tell you a little bit about what we are and what we do as an association. We do three main things. We are a member organization with about 110,000 members from over 100 countries around the world. We are a scholarly publisher. We're publishing journals. We are publishing books.
We're publishing magazines. We're publishing conference proceedings of typically peer reviewed conference literature conferences in computing. And we are, I think, probably the world's largest scholarly computer science conference organizer. So about 200 conferences a year going on under the ACM banner. And we also serve as a publisher of about 300 conferences that we don't own and operate, but we provide publishing services and hosting services in our digital library.
So that's a little bit about who we are. We publish 70 journals, probably something on the order of 70,000 to 80,000 authors a year. Last year, we published 38,000 peer reviewed research articles. Just so you get a sense of the scale of what we are and what we do. OK, so to Sarah's first question, why did we launch our model. Our model is called ACM open.
This is an institutional model. I'll give you some details about that in a few minutes. But we launched this back in January of 2020. We started building the model, developing it in collaboration with some universities, predominantly in the United States, but with input from universities around the world. And we started that development process in 2018 and formally launched at the end of January of 2020.
And right after we launched that, a couple of things happened. The first is that COVID hit and that hit in March of 2020. So my one advice to all of you publishers out there before you're going to launch a major model that's going to shake up your entire business and organization. Don't do it before a major pandemic. Bad idea. Strongly disagree.
OK yeah. I'll come back. All right. I'll come back. Great second thing that happened is a group of very prominent, about 1,500 computer scientists in our community signed a change.org petition urging ACM. I would probably say, demanding that ACM go 100% open access immediately.
Just basically take down the subscription paywall to our digital library. Those two factors were kind of instrumental in what we were doing, and obviously we couldn't just take down the paywall for, I would hope, obvious reasons. But those petitions led to a lot of internal discussions, discussions with our community, with our volunteers. ACM is very much driven as a volunteer organization. Our leadership, our board of directors, like most nonprofits, are really driven by the community itself.
And ultimately, in June of 2020, the organization decided that it was going to respond to that change.org petition by agreeing to set a deadline to commit to full 100% open access by the end of 2025, which is fast approaching. So we had a model in place that we just launched earlier in the year. We were starting to get some traction with that model, but still really early days, really uncertain.
Fast forward five years. We are about six or seven months out from that full transition, and probably when we get into some of the Q&A, I'll talk a little bit more about sustainability, which is probably the key issue for us, and I think probably for all the publishers in the room, sustainability is a huge issue and probably one of the barriers that most organizations have to transitioning to this full open access.
But we're committed. As of today, our board of directors, what we call the ACM council, has taken four votes every six months. They take a vote, and they reaffirm their commitment to actually flipping to 100% open access at the end of this year. OK, second question. What is the model.
How does it work. So unlike subscribe to open unlike some of the other models that are out there. Our model is what we call an institutional unlimited read and unlimited publish model. So that means that we are not charging either institutions or authors for every single article they publish. The model is based on a tiering system. It's 10 pricing tiers.
Those tiers are based on historical publishing output from the institution. So we look to the mechanics of it are that we look at the affiliated corresponding authors of each of the articles that we publish, we look at where those authors are affiliated with. And that's one article counted towards that institution. We then take an average of the three most recent calendar years.
We look at a table that we've created based on data. And that places an institution into a tier. Tier 1 being the largest, tier 10 being the smallest. Tier 10 is any institution that publishes 0 to three articles a year. The largest is any institution publishing 75 or more articles a year. So that just gives you a sense by the numbers. And probably this is also one of the big challenges that we've had.
And we'll continue to have the top one third of our customers. The institutions that publish a lot are being asked to pay more than yes, more than what they were asked to pay when they were just subscribing or reading content, downloading content. The bottom 2/3 that don't actively either publish with us as much are paying the same or less. And so that's fundamental. Dynamic with the model itself.
So that's the basic model authors can publish if they can get into through peer review into any of our journals or conferences or magazines. There is no cap on those numbers. And then at the end of what is typically a 3, four or five year license, the institutions will come back to us for a renewal. We'll look at their three years of most recent data. That will determine whether they stay in the same tier or move up or down the tier.
And that's how the model works. Last question. What do I see as the tensions among stakeholders. I would say there's one tension. It's money. Everyone universally agrees within our community, whether it's the authors, which, by the way, is another curious to see if there are any authors in the room.
I see one author. Great I would say authors generally have been pushing us very hard for open access. They want open access. They want the benefits of open access, which I imagine we'll talk a little bit about later on. Librarians, generally speaking, want open access. Money is always the issue. Authors want open access.
They don't want to pay APCs. That's the other issue. And then I would say the departments the administrators would like open access. The benefits of open access. Good for the departments, good for the universities. But again, it's always a budgetary issue. So those are the three big issues for me. On to you.
Thank you. Thanks, Scott. Afternoon, everybody. My name is John Edwards. I'm from plus. Plus is a non-profit, mission driven organization. And we're closely engaged around advancing open science. And we're trying to do that via changes to research, publishing, research, policy, and research practice.
We started with APCs, and we still use APCs to cover the costs of publishing content open access in our 14 journals. So many, recognize that the APC reinforces existing inequities in the system. So we really, really want to move away from it. And I think our role in possibly or small role in cementing the APC as such a commonly used mechanism means that we have a really important role in suggesting alternatives.
And so we're really trying to lead in doing that. We're thinking about this across kind of multiple fronts and multiple projects. But we have two non APC business models currently in operation. I'm going to talk about one of them today, and one of the reasons we launched them is, of course, to enable institutions to provision open access publishing services for their faculty. And engage with models that support equitable goals and take down really important barriers.
But I think we also see ourselves as an organization that's trying to affect wider change. So we're thinking about local institutional contexts of this model, but we're also trying to affect wider change in the ecosystem. So there's two dual purposes, I think. I'm going to talk about community action publishing which is a transparent cost recovery business model with collective action elements to it.
We set and make public cost recovery targets for the three journals that are sustained by this business model. And that cost recovery target is the cost to place to publish that journal. And we add 10% margin to that value. And that's our cost recovery target. And an institution's price to participate in. The business model is determined by their publishing history.
And we count corresponding author affiliations, but we also count contributing author affiliations, which is a really important point. And their price to participate is directly related to that cost recovery target. So we don't think about APCs when we're thinking about price to participate. It is directly in relation to our recouping that cost recovery target.
Now, I mentioned it's a collective action model, and the collective part of it is that if participants reach and exceed the cost recovery target that we have set, we return money to participants in a subsequent year of participation. So there is a collective interest in everybody participating and continuing to participate and to reach that cost recovery target, because it means that next year's participation will be slightly cheaper in terms of updates and how it's going.
I mean, the models are conceived to run in multiyear cycles, and we've just reached the end of cycle 1. So we're at an interesting point in reflecting on how it's gone. And participation has kind of fluctuated year on year a little bit, but we have seen it go in the right direction. And our ambition really is that the majority of revenue for these journals would be provided by participation in this model, and we're now at a really good place where approximately 50% of the revenue from these journals is provided by this model, which is fantastic.
So going into cycle 2, we have set new cost recovery targets, which we do at this juncture. And we're trying to keep the pricing as consistent as possible. But an institution's price to participate may change based on their publishing activity. During the period that we assess in terms of tensions, I think it's really interesting to think about this. And one thing I keep coming back to which I've bought a lot of people with already this week, so sorry if you've heard me say this, but I think we see a lot of institutions making APAC driven assessments about their participation in a non APAC model now.
And it's like there's an irony to that. But there's a real tension there. And I think that speaks to the fact that as a publisher we're putting out we're putting mechanics of this model out there. We're setting pricing. We're conceptualizing the concept of it. But what we also need to do is put out really, really clear method for people to assess their participation in it, because I think libraries really struggle with that.
And I don't think, well, we know that comparison to an APC driven assessment is not going to provide them with a helpful answer. And we understand why people use that internally at institutions. But I think we really need to try and move away from that. And I think the role of the publisher in helping institutions to do that is so clear. So we're doing a lot of thinking about what that looks like moving forward.
What does that look like. I mean, let me just share a couple of immediate thoughts, really. I think a lot of it comes down to trying to conceptualize a true Service Partnership between a publisher and an institution. And I think it's about trying to build up trust between those two parties, which I think has been eroded a huge amount over the years.
But it's about building up a very real understanding that the pricing and the basis for these models is fair, and I don't think that's about total transparency. I'm not sure that's the way to go, but I think it's transparency with a really clear purpose to establish and build up that trust over time. It's interesting that we make the cost recovery targets public. As I said.
But we don't have institutions asking us for a line by line breakdown of what goes into them. People don't want to go there, and I'm not sure what they would do with that information if we gave it to them. So I think it's about thinking really strategically about the transparency that we provide and making sure it contributes to that trust that we're really trying to foster.
Over to you, Lauren. Yeah hi, I'm Lauren Kane. I'm the CEO of one. One is a publisher, Library Collective, a 501(c)(3 organization. And so we've kind of been dealing with that. Tensions between stakeholders is very much part of our DNA. But when we say tensions, it's also the same opportunities or the same goals, which I think is sustainability of independent non-profit publishing.
And so for us, we have 150 different societies, museums, independent presses, publishers of 225 journals in the biological sciences. Most of these societies and most of these journals are small. Many of them are regional. Many of them would not survive without the sustaining revenue from bioone complete. It is also our view that these are. Many of them are not the natures.
They're not the sciences, but they are the building blocks of what we do. And there is absolute value. We believe in the bibliodiversity of what groups like bioone publish. So the real tension here has always been we all believe in open access. We share that mission. Our libraries share that mission.
Our publishers, societies, the research creators, the authors all want to have that content be open access. But it has to of course, be sustainable. And for an aggregation, this was a really hard nut to crack. Some of the complexities were that we could not make a decision for our content. Very jealous of publishers that can make the decision to just say unilaterally, this is best. We're going to do this for the content that we provide.
Even if we wanted to be that prescriptive, we would not have been able to. Since the individual societies that work with bio one retain the rights to adopt whatever business models and business practices that they so choose. So we needed a solution that was going to be able to operate within a mixed model context, where bio one complete, our chief product would be subscribed, it would be a subscribe conventional titles, it would be fully gold open access titles, and it would be this third bucket that we were long looking into.
What would this be. How can we create a community open access solution. And so it's been a really long runway for us. We started this journey, I think, in 2022 or in many ways before thinking about this, working with our libraries, working with our publishers about common goals. And ultimately, we decided to adopt a subscribe to open model. And this first model again, we've been working on this for quite some time, will actually launch in 2026, in January will be our first term year.
And so what this means, why this has taken us so long to achieve, is that we went out to our publishers the last couple of years, giving them the opportunity to sign on to this pilot, and it was a huge educational endeavor of what we were trying to achieve. And although they certainly wanted to have an open access future, the biggest thing that kind of had held them back in the past and that they were looking to achieve through this pilot was also revenue sustainability.
So the answer that we heard time and time again. Is open access. Great, but we still need to continue to receive that sustaining Royalty. That is the reason we are able to keep publishing, keep producing our mission. So if we can do those things together, then great. Sign us up. So again, in collaboration with our libraries, about 75% of ones supporting libraries come through consortia.
And so we did a lot of consultation with our supporting consortia. And they were really the drivers to look at the Subscribe to open model lyricists and many others were really pivotal for us to in making this selection. So ultimately, the pilot is going to include 74 titles or 71 titles from 54 societies. Again, this will launch in 2026 and subscribe to open is conditional open access.
So what this means is that if bio one reaches our revenue target for 2026 and the revenue target roughly, will be that we earn the same amount of sustaining revenue that we have earned in the past, which as a nonprofit enterprise is basically what we need to returned those same sustaining royalties to the publishers while also maintaining the operations of one. If we are able to do that, then the content for this pilot group will current volume be open.
If we do not meet our revenue target, then it will be business as usual. Those titles will remain gated. The titles that are not in the pilot again, business as usual. Conventional scribe gated. So it's really an opportunity, although there's a lot of complexity with subscribe to open. In essence, this really is a simple switch and it's the simplicity of that, I think, has been appealing to our community, the ability to go open access while retaining that sustaining revenue.
So in terms of the tensions of what we're seeing. I honestly would argue that there is less tensions for us, at least in now that we have adopted this model, or at least what we're seeing so far than what we did before. Because heading out the last few years, we were certainly under a lot of pressure, especially from our library community, especially from our consortia community, to have an answer, to open access, to have an answer for these small societies that wanted to adopt an open access approach and to do it through a partner like bioone.
So while I certainly agree with my co-panelists that there's inherently tensions between all of these stakeholder groups for us subscribe to open in this model has been a way to really bridge that gap and to provide that common ground between revenue, sustainability and an open path. So one of the reasons I wanted to convene this group is that each of these organizations have been down this path, and it sounds like you're all at these great milestone marks.
So congratulations on the announcement in 2026 for bio one. That is not trivial. The amount of work that I'm sure went into that for cap to now be three years through its cycle is an incredible achievement. And then for you guys to get to 2025 and have done it, I mean, nobody thought you were going to do it well.
I won't jinx it, but it's such an achievement. And I say that because AIP publishing is at the beginning of this process. And it was one of the reasons I was excited. It's a very different context. You guys are dealing entirely APCs. Moving to a B2B approach. You're dealing with many, many small folks trying to cat Herd. You're dealing with a commitment that is make or break.
You either do it or you don't. Our context is very similar to the other non-for-profit publishers where we have a commitment to our parent that is non-negotiable. We have to provide that to enable their mission. We have a complex range of models that we're currently trying to balance to recognize the fact that the geographic diversity of needs in terms of how we make our content available is varied.
And then we have our internal systems and cultures and ways of working that are used to a legacy subscription business that was very stable and very effective. So our approach, looking into what open science is going to mean in the physical sciences, which is a very different conversation than in the biomedical context, is what are going to be the steps to a sort of pragmatic, researcher focused open science. And for us, the first piece was we've got to figure out getting more of our content open more quickly, and we've got to reduce the APC barrier as the means to do that.
And so the model that we're looking at now, which we hope to have more detail about in the fall is really around. How do you and you alluded to this, John. So it made my heart sing a little bit. How do you get libraries out of a transactional count. The articles multiplied by some number, and that's what we should pay. And if we get more articles, then that number per Article got lower.
So we'll renew with you. And if we get less articles, that means you're too expensive and we cancel. That sort of transactional thinking is going to put all of us out of business, is going to leave us in a far less diverse economy of publishing, of scholarly publishing, and runs contrary to what the library community and the research community claims it wants.
So how do you break that transactional lens, which is very hard to do and very understandable, and try to shift thinking to a services based model that says, not unlike your gym membership, you pay a monthly fee, you have access to the sauna, the pool, the weights, the cardio. You may never use some of those things, but you have benefit of all of them. And chances are, if you came enough during the year when your membership renews in January, you just let it go through.
And maybe next time you try the spin class. This year you didn't. But you don't look and say, well, I only used cardio and I only used weights. I do not want to pay for the sauna and the pool. Can you make people make that services shift. There's a suite of services. I pay for all of them. I use some of them, hopefully get value from them.
And at the end of the day, I'm not doing an article by Article calculation on how I saw value. And that is not just a business model shift. That is a repositioning of the value of what we do. And so suddenly you're not saying, hey, I sold you ebooks last year and I'd like to upsell you to the archive this year. You're saying that our mission and values is something that you should be supporting, and that probably means you have to make a difficult budget decision about something else.
So we're not just figuring out the math, which is a nightmare. We are also figuring out how do we communicate this in a way that's compelling to a market at a time of crisis. Because when we launch this place and John knows he joined a little bit later, it was at the height of COVID, and I feel like I'm reliving it where we're trying to launch it again at the height of another crisis. And I'm actually really optimistic because nothing concentrates the mind like fear.
And when you have to start making difficult choices in the context of a crisis, you tend to put your money where your priorities are. And so I actually think you guys came out of the gate, plus came out of the gate at a time when people had to make really hard choices. And those organizations came into Marketplace with a really compelling message. So it's more than the math.
The math has to be right. You can't get away from that. And that's one of my questions for you, is how you handle you make a commitment in 2025 if you can't get the math to work on that. What are the impacts for you. And I want to come back to that. But that is the piece that we're trying to figure out. So that's why I'm going over my allowed five minutes.
So with that, let's turn to the group. I'm going to have you guys pass that mic back and forth. And I want to get into the audience because guys can't just sit here. You all need to engage with as well. But Scott. Yeah let me can I start with you on that question. I mean, one of the questions the consortia talked to us about all the time is what's your flip date.
What's your flip date. When are you going to flip fully open. And I'm like, how fast do you want to pay for that. That's always my answer because we can't do that. We can't do that. How the heck did you do that. So let me start by saying sustainability means something different to every publisher, especially in the nonprofit space.
The vast majority of publishers are very small, publishing one journal, publishing a very small book program. The number of midsize to large society publishers or nonprofits or University presses is extremely small. The vast majority is on that long tail, and we have to think about what sustainability means for each of them, for ACM. And we've been extremely transparent about this.
And actually, there are a couple of concepts that have come up, even during the initial remarks that I want to just target here. One is sustainability, one is trust, one is transparency. Sustainability for my organization means that we have to generate about $26 million next year in publishing income. If we don't do that, then there is a real world implication to our staff, to our publications, to our volunteers, to our authors, to the graduate students that we fund to travel to conferences around the world.
And so for us, that's a real number. We have to achieve that. We're not looking from one year to the next. While, of course, we have annual fiscal budgets that we have to achieve. We know what next year's budget is going to be. We know what. We made last year from our subscription based income. We know what.
We made from our open access agreements. We know what. We made from our optional APCs. At the end of the day, if we're not at that $26 million figure next year, we're in trouble. OK, so I'm out of that number. Are institutional agreements non APCs licenses for ACM open generates about $20 million a year. Now that's the level that we're at.
So there's scale here that again repeat that again. What's that. Repeat that last sentence again. $20 million from your existing from our ACM open institutional multiyear licenses that we've now signed on 1900 universities around the world and a bunch of big tech companies. So that figure is out of roughly 25 or 2,600 subscribing institutions historically that generated that kind of income. For us, of course, costs go up every year.
Inflation goes up. So that's a moving target. So that's sustainability transparency. One of the things we heard from our institutional library partners from day one was, if you're going to ask some universities to pay more, you're going to have to tell us how you're using that money. So someone suggested here, we're not going to show every line item that we make.
We actually do we publish an article every year that shows our finances. What does it cost us in journals, production, conference production, our platform. What does it cost us in staff and overhead as aggregate numbers. We're not telling you everybody's salary, but we tell you what we spend on all of those things. Because if you're going to ask libraries that are already crunched for budget to spend more, they have to understand what the value proposition is, and they have to understand exactly how that money is going to be used and that it aligns with their goals.
Trust, I think, is really it can't be understated here. And building up trust in a community and an industry where the large for profit publishers, probably most of us have worked for those over the course of our career has eroded an enormous amount of trust. And there is a big difference between a mission based organization and a for profit publishing organization that's generating 30% 40% 50% profit margins every year. For us, those margins are single digits.
Those numbers are real. We have to achieve those numbers. And if you can share enough, be extremely transparent with those customers, with those partners, they're more likely to want to align with you and support your model, especially at times like this where there's so much uncertainty, how many people hear the transparency thing and they're like shoulders start to go up, get a little stressed.
When I told my CEO and CFO that that's what we were going to have to do, they were like, what. I was like, yeah, we can't engage with this community the way we have in the past. It's a punishment of legacy behaviors and legacy business practices that many of us were not around for. But the outcomes are better if we're willing to engage with those practices. At least I've found.
So I thought for Lauren and for John, I'd really be interested because the trust and the transparency piece are completely intertwined. That to me is where the trust comes from. So in the context of both of your models, can you guys speak to how you've been building that with the community. What's worked, what hasn't. I'm happy to speak about what hasn't if you don't want to.
But if you could speak to that, those pieces fitting together, that would be really interesting and have your questions ready, please. I will come with the mic. I think it's about just having the information out there for us, and it's about giving people an insight so that they don't have to go and do their own sort of independent digging, really. I think it's about making it easy for people to engage with that question.
And I think, as I said, I think it's been striking for us that we haven't had difficult or challenging conversations about the information that we have made transparent. And I think it's just about taking that first step. And I think it is possible to do. I think there's a question behind it. Which is it. It's so difficult for libraries to engage with some of this information.
I still think that's true because it's really difficult to compare these things across publishers. It's impossible to compare it across publishers. The way journal, the business of journals is madly complex in certain ways. And so it's very difficult to unpick and make sense of. So sometimes I think it's taking that first step and being bold enough to say, here's some information we're not afraid of you kind of knowing that.
And engage with us on it. But as I said, and we differ on this, but the share all approach. I kind of question a little bit maybe, but yeah. I've been thinking a lot lately on scientific communication and communication to the general public. And I think we all know as an industry this is an area that we can do better. And we need to do better.
But I think we can also take cues, even within the industry, about how we communicate, what we do and our impact. And I subscribe to open or thinking about open models for bio one has really led to a lot of this type of thinking of OK, to your example, Scott, we need basically $3 million to run bio one the organization, and we need an additional $5 million to return to the publishers. That's roughly what we give in royalties to the bio one publishers each year.
And so as a big number, it's kind of meaningless. So what does that actually translate to. Why is this important. Well, that means that roughly each bio one society is getting, on average about $40,000 a year. Again, doesn't sound like a slightly innocuous number. Seems pretty small to most, but say, the Brazilian Society of herpetology, that $40,040,000 a year is going to keep their publication running.
It is going to make sure that the research they produce, research that is very significant in terms of climate change in that region, in terms of biodiversity conservation, in terms of a number of things that again, contribute to the science of that region and to the greater global challenges that we face. This is why that is important. So to going back to your question about transparency, I absolutely think that transparency in terms of how does the model work, what are the financial figures, how are we using this money.
That's one side of the coin. But I think increasingly the other side of the coin that's equally important is why is this important. Why are these funds important. How is it actually being used. How does this perpetuate the research and the mission. Which is why we're all here. How are we doing on questions.
Anybody ready to jump in yet. Oh, yes. OK let's do Swapna and then backs and then over to Rick. Thanks, Swapna. The Oxford University Press. My question is for Scott. Did you consider what other models did you consider before you landed on the one you did. And if so, why did you decide not to use those.
And the second question is either have you already or are you considering as a plan B, should you not meet your revenue goals. What sort of operational efficiencies you're going to have to implement to make some numbers. So first question, in terms of what other models did we consider when we launched ACM open the way that we did APCs, everyone was talking about PCs. This was very much at the dawn 2018 of transformative agreements.
Read and publish agreements that were APAC driven. One of the partners. In fact, I remember a meeting we were at, our publications board was out in San Francisco, and we invited the Dean of libraries at Uc Berkeley, a guy named Jeffrey mackie-mason, to our meeting to talk about open access and the University of California. They were one of the partners that helped develop that model.
And he was in the middle of let's say, a complex negotiation with a large European publisher and renewing a large deal. And one of the things that he didn't want was another APAC driven model. And so he said, all right, we would like to work with ACM to develop a model that is not APAC driven, so that aligned with what we were hearing from our community that was really based in one of the starting sort of places for open access in the early 90s from the machine learning community.
Open source software development built into the culture of computer scientists. I think really deep seated for decades. I remember in that community, in early 1990s, I was working for another one of those European companies and half the editorial board for my machine learning journal, up, and resigned and started an open access journal at that time. We so APCs were out. We didn't want to work at that time on subscribe to open.
Although there are elements of our model that are aligned with subscribe to open, our model is quite different. I was just always really nervous and in all the market research and discussions we had. Nervous what happens if you get to that next year and the funding isn't there. One of the notes that I took when Lauren was giving her introductory remarks was this concept of conditional open access versus what we view as perpetual open access.
Once you make the commitment that article is open, it's going to be open no matter what, forever. And I wonder, what does that mean conditional and can you take it back and nuts and bolts terms. What does that mean for Creative Commons licensing. What does it mean once you make the decision to open that article, how do you close it again. So those were real pivotal thoughts when we decided on the model that we took.
Can you repeat the second question just I forgot or operational efficiency if you didn't hit your target, what adjustments were you going to have to make. So we're not at that point yet. And I'll tell you a couple of things that we have done. So out of the 26 million I was talking about before, we're at about 20 million are locked into multiyear deals. One of the things that we always have in the back of our minds, and Sarah was talking a little bit about I guess we'll call it BT before times.
The before times. That's the T and the after t. What we don't know is the impact of budget cuts. A significant portion of the articles that we publish out of US based authors are funded by the National Science Foundation. And we all know what's happened with their budgets. So it's really too early to know what the impact of that's going to be.
And how are we going to react if we have, x millions of dollars in cancellations next year, what will that mean. It will mean that we will have to cut back on a range of things, platform expenditures that we're spending, marketing expenditures. One of the things to know about most societies and most publishers is that contrary to popular opinion, most of our costs are fixed costs. They're built in.
There's dollar amount that we spend on our platforms. There's dollar amount that we spend on certain licenses, the rent for our offices. It's not simply a question of you publish less cut back, you cancel journals, you lay off staff. Laying off staff is something that, for ACM is not much of an option. It would be very, very far down the list because we are already an incredibly thin organization.
This is a really actually important point because when you get into that transactional article world, then you are getting into a world where we publish more, we hire more people. We had a bad year. That sort of contraction doesn't. That's not sustainable. And so you want to get into a world where you're not thinking like that for exactly this reason, just a totally random thought that's popped into my head, as you were saying, that one of the consequences of opening more and more of our content.
And now I think as of right now, about 70% of the articles that we publish from our journals and our conferences are open access. As a result of these deals. What we didn't count on was that the licenses that we have with networking companies for our platforms. We pay more when there's more usage of our platforms. And so we actually spent about $1 million more last year connected to networking charges that who would have thought that would be something we actually had to plan for.
And this is where the transparency with the community is so important because as you're iterating, changing the pricing, updating it over time, the expectation is, well, why are you asking for more. And there has to be an education component of this is what we bear as we do more of this. And I think there's a lot of misunderstandings around that. Lauren, I want to let you jump in on some of those. Subscribe to opens without a full subscribe to open tutorial.
There is a community of practice and you should join it if you really want to get the nuts and bolts, but I want to make sure you can address those. Thanks, Sarah, and thanks, Scott for the question, because I think a lot of people probably have the same one. When I spoke about conditional open access, that is how we describe subscribe to open, because if a title is S 2.0, it is not a fully open access title.
It is not a flipped title. It is conditional because in each given term year, if that term is successful, that year's content will be opened. If it's not, it will stay gated and typically. Also the back file always stays gated. So that can be an exclusive benefit for subscribers. So that's the conditionality. But once a title, if there is a successful term offer and that year is open.
So in bio one's case for those titles participating in the pilot in 2026, then that content is forever perpetually open access and carrying a Creative Commons license. So there is no worry about an opening and closing. And there's an extensive FAQ on that site. So there's a lot of people that's thanks. I think it was really interesting, Scott, you saying that it came from the community and whereas I was listening to you talking, Lauren, it was really interesting that there were 43 societies have opted in and 70 something journals, but you've got a lot more journals.
So are there any sort of trends or different types of societies or different signals in those communities that seem to be more ready for this than others. So the great question. Thanks so much. So the question was basically there's interest in the model, but what are the people that are perhaps not choosing the model. Or how are we seeing this evolve over time. Well, in the case of 1, I should have noted that the pilot right now, this is a pilot.
It's an experiment. We're going to see how it works, like anything like good science. And if it's not something that's supported by the community, then we'll look on to other things that it is, then we'll see ways that we can perhaps expand it over time. But for this initial pilot phase, we only offered it to bio one complete publishers that were exclusive to bio one complete, meaning they did not have other partners in the mix.
And there were two reasons for this. One is practical because if you are a title with, say, also partnered with Oxford University Press or with Cambridge or any number of other places, then you are probably tackling the imperatives of revenue, sustainability and open access in other forms. And also for bio one, we wanted to start very targeted. And for those exclusive publishers, they are also the more vulnerable publishers.
They are the ones that on their own, it makes it very difficult for them to pursue an open access path. So of the group that we offered this we actually got about, I think, 95% uptake for the pilot, which we were very impressed by and blown away. But again, just to underscore, this is a learning opportunity for us both for bio.
One of how this will work and in extension, I think, to the whole community of how it might work for others. And I think it's an important piece to highlight here that it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I mean, I think ACM made a really bold choice in its model. But at PLOS it was Title specific with very particular issues that needed to be addressed in the pilot bio one. I think that distinction is really important when organizations are thinking about moving this direction, and I urge you to think about it.
If your organization is not remembering that don't have to go whole hog. And in fact, iterative pilots are probably the better way to go. Really makes sense. Rick hi. So speaking as a librarian, I think it a fundamental fact about how library budgets work that is very often overlooked or deleted is the fact that libraries, sometimes the discourse around these publishing models, seems to be built on the assumption that libraries have a bunch of money that they own, and that they can go out and invest in any way that makes sense to them and is in keeping with their missions.
That's fundamentally wrong. An academic library typically gets three chunks of money every year from its host institution a chunk of money for personnel, a chunk of money for collections and a chunk of money for operations. Those three budget territories are not mutually fungible. I can't use personnel money to buy journals, and I can't use operations money to hire people. The money that the University gives the library for the purpose of purchasing content.
Our collections budget is not money that they give to us and say, go out and find publishers that you like who are doing good, praiseworthy things and support them. That money is given to us for the purpose of buying access to content, and this puts the library in a really, really interesting position. When publishers start moving in a direction of something like subscribe to open, for example, where if I don't send my money to the publisher anymore, I still get access to the content.
Now, there are ways around that. Biodun has created has created sort of a freemium model that makes it easier for the library to answer the question. If you didn't give our money to bio one. What would we stop getting. ACM is putting itself in a very different position whereby the answer to that question is nothing. We would still get access to the content. And then there are publishers like annual reviews that have created what I would call a punitive model, whereby if you don't participate for a couple of years and then the title goes out of open access, you then get charged more than you would have if you had continued to.
And that's fine too. That also gives me a way that I can answer my administration if they ask. But the bottom line question does the library support this publisher's mission. The bottom line question, because the number of wonderful, mission aligned things that the university could support with its money is always going to vastly dwarf the number of things that the institution actually can support.
So thinking as a librarian, as I watch a publisher that I've been paying $100,000 a year for journals switched to an open access model, I have to ask myself, what does the University lose if I stop sending this money to the publisher. And that answer is going to vary very much from model to model. But I can tell you right now that our universe, our library, is turning off the funding spigot to multiple journals every year because it is no longer the case that we have to pay for access to their content.
It's not because we don't love them, not because we don't support them, not because we don't think their mission is fantastic, but it's because we've got other also very important, very mission aligned things that we need to do with that money. Can I got to jump on my hobbyhorse because Rick got to do his hobby horse. And Rick's hobby horse is a really important one. It takes me back to, I think, a fundamental tension that it's irresolvable as far as I can see, because Rick said what Rick said is true, certainly for his own institution.
It's true for a lot of US institutions. It is not the case in Northern Europe. It's not the case in Northern Europe. And if you are getting a big amount of subscription revenue from Northern Europe, you better go on this site and see their negotiating principles. You better go to Bob's site and see their negotiating principles. And if you can't even check the box on that, they're not going to take a meeting with you.
And much of that language is predicated on words. We don't say anymore. It's predicated on certain kinds of practices transparency, inclusivity, all of those things. So you can't even open the door. So I got to go and make a case to Rick, which is an absolutely relevant given his context. I have to make a case to jisc, and then I have to go make a case to Cas in China, which is a completely different thing.
And all the while explaining, well, why are your costs going up. Well, let me tell you what it's like to maintain six different models for a global customer base hobby horse over. But my point is the piloting is key. When we're launching this model in the fall, it is going to be limited to a very specific geography because we do not have the capacity to both test if it works and try to get everybody to do it at the same time.
And everyone walks away unsatisfied with that. But in a way you did it right. If everyone is a little unsatisfied. So rant over, Scott, please go ahead. Yeah, I mean, God, we need like three more hours to get into these things. So first to Rick's comment, which is absolutely brilliant and absolutely spot on for ACM. About two years ago, we started realizing that all those non publishing institutions are generating millions of dollars in income that we need.
And so the sustainability of the overall model depends on those institutions. When we flip to open next year and everything is open that we don't have about 1,000 to 1,500 universities around the world say, well, it's open. So I can spend my money somewhere else. And that's a huge problem. We were lucky and we are lucky, and we'll have to see how this plays out in that.
Our subscription product to what's called the ACM digital library, that's our platform. It's both a full text platform and it's a Scopus like bibliographic database. About 70% of the usage, if you look across all of our customers, comes from the non ACM content that's in the bibliographic database. So one of the things we decided to do late last year, a year out from this transition, was we're actually splitting that database into two databases.
And so there's going to be an open access database called basic. This breaking news. No Well, if you've been to our table, there's some material I haven't been to I've been told good giveaways really good giveaways Steve giveaways. So the basic version is going to have all of our free open access articles.
Everything that ACM publishes about 800,000. Articles plus the premium version is the bibliographic database with all the index. All the functionality. All the new I bells and whistles that are being built in. And that's going to be hopefully the hook for all those institutions. And we can show this is not just what we hope you'll do, but we can show you how you've been using this platform over the years.
And OK, so you're not a publishing institution. There's a subscription product that helps us to round out that sustainability picture. And this piece is actually very important. If your organizations are starting to look at some of these models, you have to find a way and excuse the shorthand to monetize read. You cannot let the institutions that contribute because they're reading but not publishing exit your revenue streams.
I mean, maybe somebody here has managed to do that. But what Scott is describing is the kind of iteration that you have to do to make sure that they stay involved and they understand from us. Again, if they can wear a mission driven hat, that exiting the system and taking that money with them is going to make is going to create a world that they will say they don't like. And again, whether they can balance that with their budget equities is a different question.
But finding a way to keep the read participation is really critical. We have a couple minutes left. I'll just let everyone go down the line, whatever you want to hit in the last two minutes, and then I'll keep an eye out for any last questions while they're going down the line. Well, I just want to I'm going to go off of what was just said, because I do think it's a really important point that Rick just made and that Scott was speaking to, is that we talk a lot about mission.
It's incredibly important to talk about mission, but also this is essentially about business models and business models is about sustainability. So I do agree that we cannot be we cannot exist just on being to use your phrase, Rick. Rick praiseworthy. That's not enough. We will not continue to be sustainable, nor should we. Just by being a good publisher and doing the thing that everyone admires.
If you do not value the content, if you do not value the research that you are receiving and the benefits that you are receiving, then you will not continue to subscribe. That is a truth and that's something we all have to keep in mind in our models if we want these to be replicable, if we want these to be scalable. But I think it's also important to remember that we're all not going into this cold.
We're doing a tremendous amount of research. And while I will be sorry if we lose, say, your institution, I will know that there are hundreds of other institutions that value what we're doing, and that, even more so than value, had put a lot of pressure on us and perhaps on others, to say, if you do not go on this path, then instead you're going to be at more risk of cancellation. So this is, I think, inherent to Sarah's great framing. These are the tensions that we're dealing with, not just tensions around mission, but tensions around the economics of what's important.
So that's why I think it's so important to have conversations like this. And I think it's so important that it might sound reductive, but to take the time and do your research and to talk to your community about ultimately not just what they want, but what are they going to economically value so that these things sustain. Yeah, completely. And I think one other way to conceptualize this is it's about making sure that there is a private benefit alongside the collective good.
And I think making sure that both of those are really sharply defined and that they align with what the institutions are looking for is really, really critical. Because without those, yeah, people aren't we want people to vote with their feet, but they're not going to vote with their feet. If all they do is just feel like it's a good idea, it's got to be a good idea.
It's got to make sense when you look at the numbers, and that's a really challenging conversation. But we've just got to get into that. It's so critical. That's one piece of advice I guess I would offer to other publishers and societies and maybe to some extent to librarians commit. And when I say commit, I think that it's important. It's essential we have to do it.
We have to experiment with different models as libraries. You have to support different models. You have to play around with them. As publishers, you have to experiment. But there does come a point where you have to commit. You have to pick a model or pick a bunch of models and be able to scale those models to your entire organization so that you can generate a significant part of your organization's income, publishing income with those models.
When we started this back in 2013, we offered hybrid. We had maxed out at 5% of the articles. We let authors decide pay an APC if you care about open access, pay an APC. We maxed at 5% And while the decision that my organization made to go 100% in five years was and has been the scariest thing you can possibly imagine, I had a lot of hair at the beginning of that process. It was like flowing, beautiful hair looks so different.
It's a caricature of my former self. It's really funny. So it was only through that commitment, that decision to set a deadline five years, give yourself enough time, but put a stake in the ground and tell the world you're going to do it. And nothing clarifies and focuses schizophrenic organizations where you've got lots of different departments, specialty societies where publishing is one of the things that you do, but you do other things too.
And everybody has competing interests. Nothing clarifies and focuses an organization towards a goal. Until you've taken that decision, you've committed to it. There's a risk there of course, but we're at 70. 70% to 75% of the articles are now sustainable. They're sustainable open access without authors having to pay anything. We never would have gotten there if that decision back in 2020 hadn't been taken, everybody would have just been trying the next thing, trying the next experiment.
The reason I part of the reason that I always ask Scott on these panels is because I don't know why you guys don't talk about this more. I think it's an incredible achievement and you've been hearing some contradictory things. Scott says, put a stake in the ground, commit, make it happen. Lauren's like, no, no, be iterative. Think about your communities. And the annoying answer is it's going to depend on what your organization can tolerate and how much bend you can give.
But the thing I would leave folks with because I learned this at floss and I'm taking advantage of it. Now is any kind of transactional approach to the key partners in this, which are institutions, is not going to work anymore. You have to sit down with these organizations, at least the ones that are moving the needle in terms of where you need to be for sustainability and have an open conversation about these are our challenges.
This is where we can engage, please engage with us. And I have been astonished at the amount of really helpful feedback that we've gotten from the consortia that we need to negotiate with on how to build something that's going to work, both for them and for us. And the amount of to your point, John, you don't have to share everything, but the fact that you're sharing key things that are essential to your business.
There's a trust dynamic there that then allows you to have conversations you never would have had before. So with that, we are over time. A big round of applause for our panelists. Thank you guys so much. One more session left. Get home safely to wherever you're headed and we will see you next time around.
Thanks, everybody.
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