The quietest weapon in the fight over scholarly publishing is not a negotiation deadline or a copyright ruling. It is a data entry form. cOAlition S has been running that form for more than three years under the name Journal Comparison Service, and the recent updates turn the form into something closer to a pricing audit for open-access journals. For universities and funders that have spent decades guessing what they were paying for, that matters more than another mandate to make papers free.
When Plan S launched, it changed the conversation about who gets to read research. It did not change the conversation about who sets the price for publishing it. Institutions kept signing read-and-publish deals that bundled reading and publishing fees, often without seeing a journal's cost structure. The Journal Comparison Service, commonly shortened to JCS, was cOAlition S's attempt to separate what a journal charges from what a journal actually costs to run.
What the Journal Comparison Service Asks Publishers to Report
The JCS invites publishers to upload standardised information about their publishing services and prices. The service breaks submissions into service categories: editorial screening, peer review management, copyediting, production, platforms, marketing, and support. Alongside those categories, publishers report prices at the journal level, allowing a library to compare two journals of similar scope and rejection rate without signing a non-disclosure agreement first.
Developed with the consultancy Information Power, the service is deliberately neutral. Publishers choose how much detail to share; libraries and funders access the data under terms that prevent them from republishing it. Critics like that it creates a central store. Supporters like that it forces publishers to describe services in the same vocabulary. The tension is that the service measures what publishers say they spend, not what anyone can verify.
Some of the most useful submissions come from society publishers that break costs down by manuscript stage. A smaller journal can show that it spends a certain amount per submission on desk screening and another amount on managing peer review. Large commercial publishers often submit portfolio-level figures that are less easily compared. That split, according to the Journal Comparison Service public guidance, is part of its design rather than a flaw: different journals have different workflows, and the service tries to capture that variety without forcing a single business model onto everyone.
More information about the service's data fields and access rules is available on cOAlition S's Journal Comparison Service page.
Here's the Catch
Transparency is not negotiating power. A library consortia director who can now see that a mid-sized journal charges three times another journal with a similar rejection rate still cannot automatically demand a lower price. Existing contracts, bundled package deals, confidentiality clauses, and the prestige of a handful of journals keep the market sticky. The comparison service gives buyers better information; it does not give them better options.
The bigger gap is what counts as a legitimate price difference. Some journals spend more because they employ professional editors, run plagiarism checks, or maintain archive systems. Others charge more because they can. A data comparison service cannot distinguish those two from a spreadsheet alone. It can expose variation, but the interpretation of that variation has to happen somewhere else: in negotiations, in funder policy, in how libraries allocate budgets, and in tenure and hiring decisions that still reward the same titles.
The Journal Comparison Service also has a participation problem laced through its power. Publishers control the depth of their own disclosures, and the coalition has so far relied on soft pressure rather than financial coercion to improve participation. That means the most opaque publishers are exactly the ones whose data would be most useful. The same dynamic surfaced in the UK's ongoing disputes over Elsevier contracts, where what libraries actually pay has become a central point of contention in a system that still treats price lists as commercially sensitive. Earlier reporting on the UK's standoff with Elsevier outlines how far those negotiations are from routine library business.
As a result, the service has become a kind of transparency test: publishers disclose more when they believe disclosure hurts someone else, less when it might hurt them. The JCS does not solve that. It documents it.
The Policy Shift: Funder Expectations Are Moving from Encouragement to Requirement
cOAlition S has gradually changed how it talks about the Journal Comparison Service. At launch, the pitch was voluntary data-sharing for publishers who support transparency. More recent implementation guidance frames price transparency as an expectation for institutions receiving public research funds. The coalition argues that if public money pays for publication, the public should be able to see what that publication service costs.
That shift resembles what happened with open access mandates themselves. First came encouragement, then eligibility rules, then compliance audits, and eventually sanctions for institutions that fail to report. Price transparency is following the same arc. In cOAlition S-participating countries, funders increasingly ask universities to explain how their subscription and article-processing charge data is made available for comparison. The Journal Comparison Service gives those funders a ready channel. Details of the funder expectations sit on cOAlition S's price transparency page.
This has knock-on effects for university administrators. A research office that negotiates a read-and-publish deal is no longer asked just for a signature page and a total sum; it is asked for supporting data that can feed into the comparison service. Contract analysis and publishing data management are appearing more often in research support job descriptions. Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council has faced similar compliance questions in its open-access policy rollout, a tension examined in earlier reporting on NHMRC open access deadlines.
Because funders are moving toward price transparency as a condition of funding, the JCS may soon become a de facto compliance tool. That is more consequential than the service's original framing as a library utility.
What the Published Data Show
The actual price variation has been enough to start awkward conversations. In early submissions, article-processing charges showed wide variation, with some low-cost and diamond journals reporting minimal fees and selective titles listing charges several times higher, while service descriptions did not always explain the difference. Portfolio-level figures from larger publishers tended to cluster around a narrow band, while society publishers showed broader spread by discipline. The pattern is consistent with what library consortia have reported for years: price is determined more by market position than by production cost.
A useful benchmark comes from the OpenAPC initiative, which collects information on article-processing charges paid by institutions. Though not run by cOAlition S, the OpenAPC public dataset shows similar variation, and its wider uptake suggests that financial transparency can be sustained once institutions build reporting workflows. The danger is that those workflows benefit the institutions that already have them. Smaller institutions with fewer data staff may find the Journal Comparison Service just another place where they are present but not represented.
For researchers, the price data remain largely hidden behind access controls. A single author cannot pull up a spreadsheet and see what their university paid to publish their paper. The JCS is designed for libraries and funders, not individual scholars. That keeps negotiations informed but does not turn authors into shoppers. In disciplines where publication venue is tightly bound to career advancement, the individual author has little reason to use a price comparison at all. This connects to a related structural problem in how journals are evaluated: indexation and selectivity still function as proxies for quality, a theme examined in earlier reporting on journal indexation as a quality signal.
What Happens Next: Moving from Transparency to Collective Action
The next six to twelve months will show whether price data changes purchasing behaviour or merely satisfies funder checklists. The more interesting test is whether library consortia use JCS data to set ceilings on article-processing charges or to walk away from bundled deals. Some European consortia already cite comparison data when pushing back on proposed fee increases. A few funders have signalled that they will refuse to cover charges above a certain threshold, though thresholds remain fragmented by discipline and currency.
That fragmentation is where the comparison service could prove most useful. If enough funders share a common view of reasonable publishing costs, publishers face a more coherent buyer. If each funder sets its own ceiling, the comparison service becomes a complex map with no route. The next stage will likely involve interoperability with open identifiers, standardised cost categories, and clearer rules on when a publisher submission is considered incomplete.
There is also a governance question. cOAlition S is a coalition of funders, not a regulator. It can encourage, coordinate, and set conditions on its own money. It cannot compel publishers to submit data, nor can it force an institution to act on the data it receives. That boundary keeps the service legally viable but limits its reach.
Photo by Maddie Jones on Unsplash
The Last Word
Stephen Pinfield, a professor of information services management at the University of Sheffield who has studied open-access markets for years, has argued that price transparency is necessary but insufficient. Without collective purchasing power, a shared price sheet is just a better-informed audience watching a market fail. The comparison service may be the first serious attempt to give that audience the same data publishers have always held. Whether it becomes a lever depends on whether the buyers choose to pull it.