Subscribe to Open (S2O)

The ‘Environment and Society’ Package

• Five high quality journals on environment and society.
• Opening access to new scholarship through S2O.
• Additional benefits (reduced price, OA Publish Guarantee, backset access etc.).
• Published by a small, fully independent family-run press.

Introduction

The White Horse Press is a small independent publisher specialising in environment and society.  We are pleased to offer a package of five scholarly journals on environment and society. The package includes several established journals of strong reputation alongside two new titles that support emerging interdisciplinary communities. Exploring interests across history, the social sciences and the humanities, all the journals in the package share a preoccupation with how society and the environment interact and feed back on one another. 

Subscribe to Open

The White Horse Press is committed to reducing and removing barriers to access for the material we publish. After all, the best, latest thought on environment and society is relevant to, literally, everyone. We are therefore offering all five of these journals on a Subscribe to Open basis. If we achieve a set revenue target for the year for any given journal, its 2024 volume will become fully and permanently Open Access under a CC BY license. Should we fail to reach the revenue threshold for 2024, the 2024 volume will remain gated (available to all those who subscribed, but not others) and we’ll try again in 2025. Revenue thresholds will be set for each journal individually. Individual subscriptions and bundled subscriptions will all count towards the threshold. Author fees will only ever apply in cases where the journal remains gated, but the author nevertheless wishes to make their own article OA.

The Subscribe to Open model is rapidly gaining traction across the industry and has the merit of being administratively simple for all concerned, since there is no need to alter the subscription process. Moreover, it does not require any special deal or agreement between subscribing institutions and a tiny press like us – libraries have enough on their plate keeping track of OA deals with bigger presses.

Please see our Ethics Statement for more detail on how we implement Subscribe-to-Open in an equitable way.

Benefits to Subscribers

• Guaranteed permanent access to the journals’ full 2024 output.
• Guaranteed term-limited access to the journals’ entire backsets, where applicable.
• Open Access Publish Guarantee, so any corresponding author from your institution who has their article accepted by a subscribed S2O journal in 2024 will be guaranteed to have that article published OA at no extra cost, even if we fail to meet the revenue threshold to unlock the entire volume.
• All ‘Environment and Society Package’ subscribers are eligible for an exclusive discount on our flagship journal, ‘Environment and History’, which is not part of the bundle (and which will remain gated for 2025). 
• All ‘Environment and Society Package’ subscribing institutions will be eligible for a significantly reduced APC price for any article published in ‘Environment and History’ (2025) by a corresponding author from that institution.
• GOLD supporters receive credit on journal versos and webpages; credit on our dedicated OA supporters webpage; and print copies where these exist.
• Access is available to libraries via all the usual subscription agents, in the normal way.
• Journals preserved in Portico and LOCKSS.
• White Horse Press is an OASPA member and committed to making a full Open Access transition, for the benefit of all.
• ‘Nomadic Peoples’ and ‘Worldwide Waste’ are already indexed in DOAJ; we will prioritise DOAJ indexing for all other journals made open access under this package.

Parallel Funding from Projekt KOALA

In the cases of Global Environment and Worldwide Waste we anticipate that a contribution to the overall thresholds in 2025–27 will be made via Projekt KOALA. 

• Projekt KOALA is a consortial open access financing mechanism for APC-free  scholarly journals. 
• KOALA will  support Global Environment and Worldwide Waste as part of a wider themed package.  
• Depending on the success of their funding programme, KOALA may be able to cover the remaining gap to threshold, if such a gap remains by 14^th February of each year.  
• Libraries participating in KOALA may choose whether to support these two titles via KOALA or S2O; we do not expect anyone to support via both channels simultaneously and we will work with KOALA to ensure full transparency about the parallel offers. 
• This applies ONLY to Global Environment and Worldwide Waste, not any other titles.

The Journals
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Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History (ISSN 2053-7352)

This is a forum and echo chamber for studies on the environment and world history, transcending the western-centric and ‘developist’ bias that has dominated international environmental historiography so far and favouring the emergence of spatially and culturally diversified points of view. 

Nomadic Peoples (ISSN 1752-2366)

This journal’s primary concerns are the current circumstances of all nomadic peoples around the world and their prospects. It engages with a wide variety of pastoralist and nomadic societies, often in the Global South, and offers incisive and policy-relevant analysis of their ways of life.

Climates and Cultures in History (ISSN 2635-1331)

This new journal will address the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of climatic variability in human history around the world. It aims to bring into conversation the expertise of all the historical sciences: archaeology and ancient, medieval, early-modern and modern history. 

Plant Perspectives (ISSN 2753-3603)

This new journal is a forum, grounded in interdisciplinary plant studies, to explore plant–human interactions in all spatial, temporal and cultural contexts. Taking ‘environmental humanities’ as its foundation, Plant Perspectives is a place where scholars and practitioners with an interest in plants can develop and hone new thinking and where – crucially – the plant itself is always centre stage.

Worldwide Waste (ISSN 2399-7117) (New addition to WHP, starting 2024)

This is an interdisciplinary journal presenting innovative research on waste from around the world. It critically interrogates the cultural, social, economic and political systems within which waste is created, managed and circulated. The White Horse Press will began publishing Worldwide Waste in 2024.

Pricing

Environment and Society Package 2025 (online only): GBP £890 / €1050 / $1130

GOLD supporter 2024: £2100 / €2490 / $2670

Exclusive discount on ‘Environment and History’ (online only): GBP £310 / €365 / $405

Journals subscribed under the S2O bundle cost roughly 10–15 per cent less than the same content bought at individual 2025 prices.

More About The White Horse Press

We are small independent publishers specialising in environment and society. We take pride in our rigorous academic standards and in offering our authors intelligent, flexible and individual treatment from editors with academic backgrounds and writing experience. Our small size gives us agility to navigate the changing publishing landscape, and freedom to define our own publication agenda. 

We are now working hard to move towards a fully Open Access business model. Opening access to all our publications, as well as being the right thing to do, will help boost the profile of our publications and help our authors to be read and cited more widely. We are proud to be members of OASPA, members of the Open Book Collective, and participants in the Subscribe to Open Community of Practice.

For more information about White Horse Press, you can watch our video or read more here.