It’s International Open Access Week (October 20 to 26, 2025), a time when Open Access supporters in the research community share their experiences making scholarship openly available to the global community of scholars.
2025 marks a year of unprecedented usage for the Penn Press journals program, and much of this is thanks to our growing Open Access program. So far in 2025, 40.23% of the Penn Press content read on Project MUSE was Open Access.
Penn Press supports Green, Gold, Diamond, and Subscribe to Open (S2O) models of Open Access. We have six Diamond OA titles, with the Jewish Quarterly Review being the latest—the journal’s 135 years of content will be openly available to read starting in January 2026.
In today’s post, we will share the results to date of our participation in the Project MUSE Subscribe to Open Program. The S2O model mirrors the library subscription model with a twist: if the publisher’s subscription revenue goal is met, the content flips to open for everyone. We are grateful to Project MUSE for the work they did to develop a model specifically for MUSE publishers: because MUSE hit their 2025 revenue goal for their Premium Collection, the 2025 content of ~100 of the 720+ journals in this collection became OA.
The Penn Press titles included in MUSE S20 are:
- Change Over Time
- Early American Studies
- Eudora Welty Review
- French Forum
- Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development
On average, usage across these journals has increased by a factor of 3.42 over the same period last year. Below, we share anonymized usage from one journal that published its first Subscribe to Open issue in February 2025 and has published a total of three S2O issues so far in 2025.
In the chart below, “free” is content that is temporarily freed for publicity purposes; “gated” is content that was accessed through a traditional subscription model, and “Subscribe to Open” is usage of the S2O issues published this year, all as a percentage of total usage. These three 2025 S2O issues received 35.9% of overall usage despite there being 20 volumes of content from this title on the MUSE platform (with MUSE’s S2O model, back content from the journal remained gated).
The chart below shows usage of the same title compared with 2024.
Usage is up 60% over the same period last year (February to September). The journal also saw greater geographic diversity of its readership.
The usage impact on other Penn Press journals that are participating in MUSE Subscribe to Open has been similarly impressive. We are looking forward to reviewing a full year’s worth of data and to sharing it with others in the Open Access community.
