Throughout the progression of the open access movement, a lingering question has been which OA models will be most applicable and sustainable for research in the humanities and social sciences. While article transaction fees, transformative agreements, grants, and subsidies have proven viable routes for many STEM journals to make their content free to read, scholars and institutions often have more limited funds for such approaches in HSS fields.
However, a new initiative aims to change that: Project MUSE’s Subscribe to Open (S2O) program. The leading HSS database out of Hopkins Press and Johns Hopkins University is putting a collective action spin on the S2O model. In the MUSE S2O program, participating publishers’ journals become fully OA if enough institutions subscribe to the various MUSE collections so that a predetermined revenue threshold is met. The program successfully launched in 2025, opening access to over 100 participating titles, including 43 from Hopkins Press. The Hopkins Press Journals Division is led by Journals Director and Publisher Bill Breichner.
I reached out to Bill to learn more about Hopkins Press’s experience participating in MUSE S2O. Below is a transcript of our discussion, which is part of Scholastica’s new “Community Conversations” blog series, where we invite Scholastica users to share their latest publishing initiatives and learnings.
Many thanks to Bill for taking the time for this interview!
Interview with Bill Breichner
Firstly, could you share a bit about Hopkins Press’s involvement in the development of the MUSE S2O program and the impetus for it?
BB: Since MUSE is a division of Hopkins Press, we have appreciated having the opportunity to be involved in the S2O program in some capacity from the early stages. The folks at MUSE, along with an outside consultant and the strong support of the Executive Director, Barbara Kline Pope, were the architects, designers, and champions of the initiative. Once they reached a point where they were ready to fine-tune everything and start rolling it out, I had the opportunity to comment and make suggestions with the consultant they worked with, so it was a collaborative process in that way. Hopkins Press signed on for a three-year period, so we’re committed, and we want to see where this program can take us.
As far as the impetus for the program, I can’t speak for MUSE, but I think one of the main drivers was that humanities publishers have had limited OA options up to this point. Only a small portion of the content we publish has funding attached to it, so the ecosystem can’t really support APCs. Humanities publishers, especially of our size, also don’t have the capacity to engage in transformative agreements generally. Speaking from the Press side, this S2O model offers a viable alternative because it leverages the traditional subscription infrastructure. One of the beauties of it is that libraries don’t have to do anything other than continue to subscribe to MUSE as a product. MUSE’s program is also the first time an aggregation has been involved in the S2O model, and that’s what makes this implementation unique and I think special. It’s not content from a single publisher; it’s an aggregation within an aggregation, and you add value through that collaboration.
Overall, I think it seemed like a really reasonable and promising experiment to try.
What were your primary considerations going into the MUSE S2O program?
BB: I was trying to be very selective about which journals I chose to include, because this type of program isn’t ideal for all publications. For instance, I probably wouldn’t want to include a journal that has a high rate of single-title institutional subscriptions because I wouldn’t want to put that subscription revenue unduly at risk. The key was identifying the journals that met the best-fit financial criteria.
I spent a lot of time talking to our journal partners and putting together a separate agreement for this, plus the Press through MUSE put some guarantees out there financially to make the pilot more approachable to publishers. It’s very important to us to keep our partner journals financially viable, especially in these uncertain times, and to support the missions of the associations we work with, so we felt a strong, serious obligation to them.
Of course, the primary goal of opening access to content is to have it reach more people. I would argue that, right now, especially, getting university press and humanities publisher content in front of not only more scholars but also into the public sphere is more important than ever. We need to have those different voices out there to sort of counterbalance some of the other dominant voices. So, I think this is an opportunity for our authors, our scholars, and our communities to be heard, and that’s a big incentive for participation, too.
What was the MUSE S2O rollout process like?
BB: The real work for me was coming up with criteria for inclusion to select the journals that I wanted to approach and develop a compelling rationale for them to consider participating. Once we had the journals’ buy-in, there was some fine-tuning of the financial arrangements in negotiations with them, and that was sort of the process.
It wasn’t difficult once we had selected the journals that would be participating. I did a bit of coordination with MUSE when I gave them the initial list and then periodically when we confirmed the final list. We did have to hit a deadline for participation, so it was a little intense for about a six or seven-month period as we worked to get the JHUP journals lined up for MUSE.
MUSE had a sort of internal target to bring on 100 journals, and I realized that Hopkins Press was going to want to deliver a good bulk of that. It seemed like we needed to be the ones to step forward, because if we included a significant number of journals, that would be a message to the other publishers that we believed in the pilot. We want MUSE to be successful because if MUSE is, so is our program.
What would be your advice for other publishers considering joining MUSE S2O or piloting an S2O model in general?
BB: I would say to look at the financial aspects of the journal or journals they’re thinking about including in some version of an S2O initiative. One of the primary concerns I think many have with S2Os at the publisher level is what happens to single title institutional subscription revenue once those titles have been open through an S2O for five or more years? Does that jeopardize those subscriptions?
So, you have to consider how the individual journals you’re thinking of including in an S2O program are situated from a variety of perspectives, including, for instance , whether they are affiliated with an association or society.
I don’t think this is a good model for a startup publication. I think S2O is better suited for established journals where you have sufficient data that can be considered in your decision-making process. You really need to take a deep dive into why you are thinking of participating. What are the risks? What are the advantages? In other words, what’s the ROI, and then make a decision that is tailored to each journal’s situation.
What are your hopes for the S2O program, looking to the future?
BB: One of the things that I would like to see come out of this program is an increase, not just in usage, but impact. Raw usage is going to increase substantially. But what is the impact of that usage? We want to develop metrics that measure this for the Hopkins Press participating titles and, more importantly, the editors and sponsors of those journals.
For instance, for our journals that use Scholastica’s peer review system, will we see more submissions from underserved and underrepresented areas of the world where scholars currently don’t have access to the content? That’s a question we’ll be curious to try to answer.
I think usage is one of the trickier areas to track because usage metrics alone don’t tell the full story. You might find that usage went up 30%, but what does that mean? Was it quality usage? I think the way to tell that will likely be looking at a combination of factors like citations and Journal Impact Factors, along with general usage metrics. Again, we made a three-year commitment to MUSE S2O. So I want to be able to come up with some measurement down the road as to what the impact of it was, and I’ll be excited to see that.
Overall, I’ll be curious to see how this model weathers different economic periods, especially at this time of greater uncertainty. For publishers in the university press and nonprofit space, I think MUSE has always been a place where we can compete with large, for-profit organizations that are better resourced. That’s because the MUSE platform is so robust. MUSE has historically leveled the playing field while delivering an outstanding financial reward in terms of royalties. It’s unprecedented how much of the revenue is returned to publishers. So, by its very nature and design, MUSE has always been collaborative, and I’m hopeful that this new model will be able to leverage that spirit.
Thanks again to Bill for taking the time for this interview!
Interested in reading more Scholastica community conversation series blog posts? Check out our last interview with President and Founder of Clockwork Communications, Deborah McNamara, about how Clockwork is developing collaborative journals to help specialty associations maintain quality publications while managing costs.
