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In recent months, we have received inquiries about our Subscribe to Open model and the Demography offset fee, so we thought a concise explainer would be helpful. Demography became a Subscribe to Open (S2O) journal in January 2024. Our not-for-profit publisher, Duke University Press (DUP), relies on institutional subscriptions to support its overhead publishing costs for the journal (see this helpful summary PDF), and the content for a given year is made fully Open Access (OA) if the annual funding threshold is met by March 31. If the threshold is not met (which happened this year), then that year’s content will be available only to subscribing institutions and their affiliated researchers and readers, as well as all PAA members. In short, the S2O model relies on and incentivizes the support of the international academic community and its many institutions and libraries. The S2O pricing structure ranges from $250 to $750 for U.S. institutions and from $125 to $750 for international entities, depending on national income level and highest degree offered.

Under the S2O model, institutions have a compelling incentive to become a subscriber: if the journal gets enough subscribers to cover the annual DUP funding threshold, then that year’s volume becomes OA for everyone everywhere; if the threshold is not met, then only readers affiliated with subscribing institutions—and PAA members—will have access to all content. Regardless, for a specific article, if the corresponding author’s institution is an active subscriber prior to manuscript acceptance, then that article will be OA in perpetuity. See the current list of subscribing institutions. If your institution is not a subscriber, we encourage you to contact your libraries and ask them to subscribe; here is a sample email for this purpose. The Duke FAQs page further describes the journal’s funding model and subscriber benefits.

Apart from the subscription revenue that directly supports DUP publishing costs, PAA charges a $1,000 per article editorial management offset fee to help defray the cost of the editorial team that works on your manuscripts. This offset fee does not make an article OA, but rather helps PAA cover the costs of processing, editing, and proofing the accepted articles. These tasks require considerable time and effort, and we are fortunate to have a veteran team of editors and proofreaders to keep the Demography manuscript train rolling.

For all journal inquiries, as well as questions about manuscript preparation or specific publishing timelines, please write the Managing Editor, John Thomas.