03/02/2025
The JCS was launched in September 2022 to support the Plan S principle that Open Access fees should be transparent and commensurate with the publishers’ services. It was developed following detailed consultations with librarians, publishers, legal experts, and software developers with the aim to shed light on open access publishing fees and services. The JCS was designed to enable those who procure these services (libraries and funders) to better understand how journals and publishers compare on a range of key indicators. Our aspiration was to create a useful and secure price transparency tool for assisting libraries and library consortia in their open access negotiations with all publishers.
Achieving this ambition required enlisting a significant number of publishers who levy open access publishing fees to deposit their price and service data with the JCS. When the JCS was launched, 27 publishers responded positively to the call for transparent pricing of publishing services and agreed to share their data, representing over 2,000 journals. However, three years later, although the number of participating publishers has increased to 37, they represent far fewer journals – only 549 in total. Inevitably, with such limited journal coverage, relatively few librarians, library consortia and funders were motivated to register to use the service. At the end of 2024, the JCS had just 105 registered end users, who accessed the service on 163 occasions in that year.
Given these low numbers – and the relatively high costs of maintaining this service – we have taken the decision to sunset it, effective 30th April 2025. “It is disappointing that the JCS never fulfilled its potential”, commented Robert Kiley, Head of Strategy at cOAlition S and the lead architect of this service. “The reasons for this are no doubt multiple: more publishers could have provided data; library consortia could have contractually required publishers to share data through their agreements; funders could have done more to encourage its uptake by both publishers and librarians. But the lessons learned from this experience are not lost and cOAlition S is not giving up on its principles. Although we are closing the JCS, we are continuing our work with committed partners towards more equitable and transparent open access fees and publishing models”.
We would like to thank all those publishers who provided data to the JCS and those users who registered and made use of this service. The code developed for the JCS will be made available for others to reuse at: https://github.com/CottageLabs/journalcomparisonservice.