Will Plan S put learned societies in jeopardy?

In the digital age, the model of paying to read research has been questioned, and there has been a move toward open access publishing, where content is freely available to all, including machines. The European Union and European Research Council, together with 13 European research funding organizations and 3 charitable foundations, have now accelerated the pace of change, with their Plan S [1], announced in September 2018. From 2020, all researchers receiving funds from these organizations (cOAlition S) will be required to publish their work in open access journals and on platforms that are compliant with the rules of Plan S. For many learned societies, journal publishing is one of their most important activities. The journals provide their members with platforms to publish their research and to read the work of others. A quick look at some of the most established scientific journals shows that many of them are run through their corresponding learned societies. For example, The FEBS Journal and FEBS Letters are run by The Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS), PNAS is published by the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry is owned by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB). By selling subscriptions to these journals to the wider academic community, learned societies make an income, which supports the many other services they provide to the scientific community. Most societies are supportive of open access. Some, like FEBS, have recently launched new open access journals while others have adopted a ‘hybrid’ model of publishing open access articles within their subscription journals, with adjustments to subscription charges to avoid so-called ‘double dipping’. However, the restrictions placed by Plan S will probably mean that hybrid journals will be off limits to authors in receipt of funds from cOAlition S members. Society publishers are faced with making rapid changes to their business models or maybe losing their journals and with them most of their income. If Plan S was fully implemented this would have a dramatic effect upon the annual revenue income stream of FEBS. For instance, if we could maintain the current levels of papers published for each of our journals and charge the current article processing charge (APC) for each journal, then the annual income would likely be reduced to less than half, which would consequently cover less than half the current annual expenditure on our activities. Many of our current activities would need to be dramatically curtailed or even axed. The knock-on consequences will mean a severe reduction for the many hundreds of postgraduate students and early-career scientists that we currently help on an annual basis. Restricting opportunities for development and growth of the next generation of molecular life scientists, due to limited availability of funds from FEBS and those of similar learned societies, could ultimately restrict the future progress of science in Europe. Another aspect of Plan S that is worrying society publishers is the pace of change. Flipping a journal to open access immediately is costly [2]. In further implementation guidance published in November [3], Plan S has offered a window of 3 years (to the end of 2021) for publishers to set in place transformative agreements that transition their journals from ‘pay to read’ to ‘pay to publish and read’, with the journals moving