An Update on Transformative Agreements

Transformative Agreements: a path to Open Access?

This blog post is an update to a previous post “SFI’s updated Open Access Policy – The Why and How”, published in February 2021. It explains what Transformative Agreements are and looks at why our researchers recently received a message saying that our Open Access allocations for 2021 for four publishers are due to run out before the end of the year.

What are Transformative Agreements?

In Ireland, Transformative Agreements (sometimes called Open Access Agreements or Publish & Read deals) have been negotiated between publishers and Libraries through the consortium IReL.

IReL pays the publisher for both subscription and Open Access publishing fees (often called Article Processing Charges or APCs). The idea is that library subscription expenditures will be repurposed to cover Open Access APCs. Over time it is expected that subscription expenditures go down (because more and more content will be available Open Access) but publishing costs will go up. The overall process will “transform” the publishing landscape to Open Access as the default model and remove “paywalls” to access research publications for staff, students and the general public.

Transformative Agreements are supported by the Irish Government. In early summer this year, Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science Simon Harris welcomed Ireland “taking a huge step forward in providing open access to research”.

What are the benefits for authors?

Here is the main benefit: you will get offered automatically Gold Open Access with no cost to you by the publisher. There is no need to fill in forms or to communicate with the Library. The Gold Open Access offer is available to all NUI Galway authors (or authors from other institutions who are part of the IReL consortium), to PhD students as well academic staff. This allows researchers to publish Gold Open Access who do not have a budget to pay for an APC (typically 1,500-3,000 Euros) with little bureaucracy involved.

In order to be eligible to benefit from a Transformative Agreement you must be the corresponding author of the publication and affiliated with NUI Galway at the time of acceptance. It does not matter who the co-authors are and where they are based, eligibility is defined by who is the corresponding author.

Who pays for Transformative Agreements at Irish universities?

IReL funds the Transformative Agreements that enable authors of participating institutions to offer their authors to publish Gold Open Access with no cost to the author. IReL is the nationally funded e-resource licensing consortium that buys subscriptions so Irish universities can access electronic journals, databases and monographs. In addition, IReL now negotiates Transformative Agreements. Essentially, these Agreements are centrally funded by the Irish state (and do not come out of the budgets of individual institutions).

The situation is different with the Elsevier Agreement, which is funded by contributions from participating members including NUI Galway.

Transformative deals are part of a wider change in the publishing industry. Image from Pixabay

Are all Transformative Agreements the same?

No, there are some important differences between Transformative Agreements that are worth taking note of:

Timeframe

Agreement periods span three to five years, with three years the most common period. As they started at different dates in 2020 and 2021 they will end at different times. The Elsevier deal is the first major one to come to an end, at the end of 2022.

Coverage

Some Agreements cover all journals by the publisher (e.g. Emerald, Royal Irish Academy), but the ones with the bigger publishers typically do not. Here are some examples:

The Science Direct agreement covers about 80% of journals published by Elsevier excluding The Lancet and Cell Press titles as well as some Learned Society journals.
The Sage agreement includes hybrid titles but publishing in Open Access journals will result in a 20% discount (i.e. authors need to pay 80% of APCs).
The Wiley agreement includes all hybrid (partially open access) and Gold (fully open access) journals but excludes a small number of Wiley subscription-only journals.

Capped versus uncapped agreements

This is another important point that differentiates one agreement from another. Agreements with most publishers, especially the bigger ones, are “capped”, which means the consortium gets an agreed maximum number of “free” APCs to use throughout a year. If you recently have received an email explaining that agreements with certain publishers (Elsevier, OUP, Springer, Wiley) are “running out” this is why.

Here are the main facts about this:

Deals without a cap

These agreements allow NUI Galway authors to publish as many articles Open Access as they wish:

Deals with a maximum number of included APCs

The consortium IReL gets a fixed quota of APCs per year from these publishers:

The reason that maximum numbers are a feature of a Transformative Deal deal is financial. From a library perspective uncapped deals are desirable and preferable but (very) expensive. Publishers look at how many APCs they would be likely to “sell” across Ireland and factor that into their offers.

Here are some examples for caps: the maximum number for Wiley is 535 articles (across all IReL participating members), 933 for Elsevier and 113 for Oxford University Press. They can also vary year by year. For example, the 2021 allocation for Springer Nature is 270. in 2022 this number will rise to 369. (All numbers are published on the IReL website covering the Agreements).

What happens when we reach the capped number of a deal?

The IReL office monitors how many APCs are used per deal and projects if we are likely to reach the maximum number and when. Hence the recent announcement that the maximum number of APCs with Springer, Oxford University Press, Wiley and Elsevier will be reached soon (autumn 2021).

If that happens you will not get offered “free” Open Access when your paper in a journal covered by an IReL agreement but the standard publication options including Open Access fees.

You can still publish your paper Green Open Access through an institutional repository, like NUI Galway's ARAN as Plan B but this might involve an embargo of typically 6-24 months.

Do Transformative Agreements cover all publication charges?

Transformative Agreements cover Open Access charges (APCs) which the authors will not have to pay. But be aware that colour charges, society fees, page charges or similar fees are not covered by the Agreements!

Are these agreements really “Transformative” and what happens next?

That is a hotly debated topic and the verdict is still out there. A recent paper analyses that it is “hard to assess whether transformative agreements are transitory or will perpetuate the current structure of the scholarly communication system.” The next set of negotiations of Open Access agreements will show if publishers offer more favourable deals and if libraries might walk away from offers that do not help with the transition to a fully Open Access publishing environment.

A lot of money is at stake. Annually, €7.6 billion is spent globally on journal subscriptions. Some argue that this amount could be better spent by introducing APCs that are capped to a certain amount. Others advocate to replace academic journals with a non-commercial infrastructure governed by the academic community and libraries. The EU Commission and others are also looking at alternative, APC-free business models such as Diamond Open Access. Funders are also active in the field, evidenced by HRB’s Open Research platform or by Wellcome Open Research.

It looks like momentum towards Open Access is irreversible. However, there won’t be a simple solution and a single business model that finances Open Access. Libraries will assist in explaining options and administrating deals. However, researchers and authors will have to navigate the complex landscape and need a certain level of “Open Access literacy” to find the best option for their publishing needs.

If you have any questions on how you can publish Open Access at NUI Galway get in touch with Hardy Schwamm, Open Scholarship Librarian via email or Twitter.

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