(3 Feb 2025) cOAlition S has announced that it will discontinue the Journal Comparison Service (JCS), effective from 30 April 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 service 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, with an aspiration “to create a useful and secure price transparency tool for assisting libraries and library consortia in their open access negotiations with all publishers”.
When the JCS was launched, cOAlition S says 27 publishers responded positively to the call for transparent pricing of publishing services and agreed to share their data, representing more than 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.
The announcement is here.
