What is a transformative agreement?
The idea of transformative agreements was originally initiated by the University of California System in 2018. The idea behind such licensing arrangements was to move libraries and publishers away from a “pay to read” model in which libraries paid publishers for subscriptions to academic journals on behalf of faculty, students, and other researchers. A so-called “transformative” agreement was a transitional time-limited arrangement that would move the scholarly publishing system toward a “pay to publish” model in which authors of articles would pay to make their articles available through publishers. Often you’ll also hear transformative agreements referred to as “read and publish” or “publish and read” agreements.
Don’t transformative agreements require authors to pay, and why is that?
Reacting to public access trends in publishing, many, though not all, publishers switched to new financial models that include Article Processing Charges (APCs) to make scholarship openly available at publication. Transformative agreements generally include some kind of APC payments that the library will cover on behalf of its institutional researchers in addition to paying the cost of subscribing to those publishers’ journals, so you can access what’s behind the paywall. Why libraries enter into transformative agreements is they often cover some, or all, of those APCs in the licensing agreement to minimize how much authors pay — just like with our new agreement with Elsevier.
The publishing industry has been supported by subscriptions, and is now moving toward “public access.” What is public access?
Public access refers to one way researchers and students can make their scholarship available. The “public” word simply means that anyone in the world, regardless of where they are, can access your research without having to pay for it. Works unavailable to the public simply mean that only certain readers within specific institutions like Dartmouth can access your research.
Increasingly, researchers also recognize that scholarship happens more and more on an international scale. Previously, a researcher (or a few from the same country) would publish research that would be accessed by a small group of people from industrialized countries, and that was considered good enough. Now, researchers collaborate with people worldwide and with global partners who don’t have access to expensive journals, but it’s imperative they do to share their work. This newer global collaborative research model underscores the need for broadening access to anyone, anywhere — not just at prestigious, large research institutions.
Additionally, in fields like medicine, authors may want patients with certain medical conditions to read about the latest treatments or better understand their diagnosis. But, most of that research is behind a paywall. Federal agencies have increasingly recognized the lack of access to research is a problem, and have mandated some form of public access for their grants.
How is public access supported financially?
In the past, entities throughout the research process, including research funders, government agencies, academic institutions, libraries, or individual researchers and readers have borne the costs to make research available publicly. This diverse support of public access to scholarship mirrors the diversity of those who support the creation of research.
Over time, institutions felt the pressures of a shifting publishing landscape, mostly financial. Currently, some publishers, often the most well-established and for-profit ones, are advancing models like “gold” and “diamond” open access. The first requires authors to pay, and the second doesn’t. These are just two of the many publishing models out there. While the goal of public access is to increase access to research, supporting scholarly outputs will continue to require significant financial support from institutions.
How do these changes in the publishing landscape impact the Libraries’ Elsevier agreement specifically?
Authors have more to consider when publishing their research, and our new agreement with Elsevier means there’s one less thing to worry about. With this agreement, we’re ensuring that a number of Dartmouth-affiliated researchers will no longer pay as many APCs to make their research publicly available. This agreement also extends the Dartmouth community’s access to over 2,400 Elsevier journals. Overall, it builds on our existing programs supporting open scholarship.
This agreement isn’t a novel concept. We already have several “transformative” agreements in place. With the shift to public access, we’re mindful of the need to provide funding to subsidize publishers’ APCs. It’s not the sustainable model to take into the future. However, we’re interested in better understanding how these changes affect the Dartmouth community and how we can best meet Dartmouth’s needs while fulfilling public access mandates and mitigating other publishing costs.