The Sector

The learned society journal surplus is over. What next?

By Owen Pritchard · 30 July 2026

If you sit on the finance committee of a learned society, you have spent much of the past decade watching one line in the accounts with particular attention. It is the publishing surplus, the money your journals generate above their costs, and it has been quietly paying for a great deal else: the grants scheme, the early-career prizes, the conference subsidy, sometimes the membership department itself. For more than a century this arrangement looked like a law of nature. It is now a line under structural pressure, and every society that depends on it needs a successor plan.

How did journals come to bankroll the learned societies?

By accident of origin, then by design. The learned society was a Victorian invention, and the journal was its core product. The Chemical Society, founded in 1841 and resident at Burlington House from 1857, existed in large part to publish its proceedings and circulate them to members. Membership and subscription were effectively the same transaction: you joined to receive the journal, and libraries joined because their readers needed it.

That model hardened into a business after 1945. Research expanded, library budgets grew, and societies discovered that institutional subscriptions, priced for libraries rather than individuals, generated reliable surpluses. The Royal Society of Chemistry, formed in 1980 by merging the Chemical Society with three other bodies, states the arrangement plainly on its own pages: it is a not-for-profit publisher whose surplus is invested to support its aim of advancing the chemical sciences. Publishing is not a sideline. It is the financial engine, run from Thomas Graham House in Cambridge, funding the member-facing organisation in London.

The result was a cross-subsidy so old that most societies stopped seeing it as one. The journals paid for the mission because the journals were the mission, once.

What did Plan S and the funders actually change?

The unit of payment. Plan S, launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, an international consortium of funders including UK Research and Innovation and the Wellcome Trust, requires that publicly funded research be published in compliant open access journals or platforms from 2021. Hybrid journals, the subscription titles that also sold open access article by article, were declared non-compliant.

The consequences arrived in sequence. First came transformative agreements, the read-and-publish contracts in which a university’s library payment covers both access and its authors’ publishing fees, with cOAlition S treating them as a transitional device rather than a destination. Then, in October 2023, cOAlition S published its Towards Responsible Publishing proposal, arguing for a scholarly publishing model with no author-facing fees at all, the so-called diamond route. Each step moves money from the reader side of the transaction to the producer side, and each step squeezes the margin a subscription journal could defend.

The funders’ logic is hard to argue with in public: taxpayers paid for the research, so taxpayers should read it. Learned societies, it should be said plainly, were among the bodies that opposed Plan S at launch, warning about exactly the income effect now visible. That warning was self-interested and correct at the same time.

Which societies are most exposed?

The exposure that matters is numerical, whatever the prestige of the list. The question for any board is what share of unrestricted income comes from publishing, and how much of the member offer it cross-subsidises. A large society with chemistry, bioscience or physics journals of international standing has scale, capital and negotiating power with the big library consortia. A mid-sized society with one or two respected journals and a small membership has neither.

The pattern to watch is the one where the surplus funds the things members most visibly value: the small grants round, the travel bursaries, the discounted conference rate for early-career researchers. When the surplus narrows, those are the first casualties, and they are precisely the benefits that justify the subscription a member pays voluntarily. Cut them, and the society weakens the renewal case that funds everything else. That is the feedback loop finance committees should be modelling, and some are.

The journals paid for the mission because the journals were the mission, once. That sentence is now past tense.

Can open access publishing still pay?

Sometimes, at the top of the market. Prestige journals can charge article processing charges that authors or their funders will pay, because a strong title still confers career value. But the APC model has a structural flaw for societies: it rewards volume. A commercial publisher grows revenue by accepting more papers; a society that does the same dilutes the selectivity that made its journals worth publishing in. The incentives point against the mission.

The deeper problem is that open access removes the scarcity the surplus was built on. A subscription journal sold exclusivity to libraries. An open journal sells a service to authors, in a market where authors are courted and price transparency is now a funder requirement. cOAlition S’s price and service transparency frameworks exist to press down on exactly the margins that once floated a grants programme. Societies can still publish well and some will publish profitably, but the era of the surplus as an unthinking annuity is finished.

What replaces the surplus?

Nothing single, which is the point. The societies furthest through this have stopped looking for one replacement income and started rebuilding the member value proposition as a portfolio. The recurring elements are familiar from elsewhere in the sector: professional development and CPD that employers will pay for, accreditation and chartered designations with labour-market value, events priced as products rather than loss-leaders, and data or intelligence services built on assets the society uniquely holds, whether that is a chemical database or a salary survey.

The irony is structural. The journal began as the membership product, then became the funder of the membership product. What survives of the transition is the need for the product itself: a concrete reason for a working professional or researcher to belong. Societies that spent the subscription decades letting the journals do that work are now learning the lesson the rest of the sector has lived with all along, that membership value has to be earned annually and visibly. Our briefing on the membership model sets out the mechanics; the state of the sector analysis puts the income pressure in its wider context.

The next trustees’ report cycle will show which societies treated 2026 as the year to act. If yours has not yet quantified its publishing dependency, that is the first paper to commission.