Today, under the predominant yet outdated subscription model, libraries pay lump-sum fees for read access to journal packages, and authors wishing to publish open access in an otherwise closed subscription, or “hybrid”, journal pay Article Processing Charges (APCs). In transformative agreements hybrid publishing costs are reined in and the revenue flows are shifted: authors no longer pay APCs and, instead, their institutions (via their libraries) repurpose former subscription expenditures to remunerate publishers for their editorial services associated with the open access publication of accepted articles.

While they share a common goal, each agreement is unique and context-specific, taking into consideration the current level of subscription spending, largely based on historical print expenditures, and the relative volume of publication that an institution or consortium has with a given publisher. They may also vary based on the publisher’s capacity to adjust internal administrative processes and production workflows. In this period of transition, some portion of the fees may be paid to a publisher are designated in “reading” fees to acknowledge the access given to the remainder of the publisher’s journal portfolio still behind the paywall, but in all such agreements a substantial portion of the contract fees are attributed to open access publishing services. In recent iterations, fees have been fully converted to open access publishing and are even paid in direct proportion to the number of articles published, showing a clear development of transformative agreements toward systemic change.

Recognizing that there are multiple pathways to open access, none of the strategies implemented to date has succeeded in shaking the market dominance of the paywall system in scholarly publishing; today, more than 15 years after the Berlin Declaration, more than 80% of the world’s scholarly outputs are still locked behind paywalls, inhibiting the full impact of research and putting enormous strain on institutional budgets. At the same time, subscription publisher revenues stemming from hybrid publishing increase year after year.

Transformative agreements offer institutions a framework to take immediate action and address the subscription paywall system (and hybrid publishing) head-on. As the vast majority of scholarly publishing and expenditure of any given institution tends to be concentrated in journals/packages of a relatively small number of publishers, implementing transformative agreements with these publishers, especially, constitutes a high-impact strategy: many institutions and consortia find that by negotiating such agreements with fewer than 10 publishers, they can achieve immediate open access for the vast majority of their outputs.

At the same time, transformative agreements can have an equally significant role in transitioning the portfolios of Societies and small to mid-sized publishers, and they have a variety of models (not merely APC-based) that reflect the diverse and fluid landscape of scholarly communication.

Already a number of national and regional licensing consortia and individual institutions, through their libraries, have succeeded in negotiating cost-neutral transformative agreements with publishers that enable 100% of their outputs to be published open access. As other research-intensive organizations and national consortia follow suit, the impact becomes immediately apparent.

In the Final Statement of the 14th Berlin Open Access Conference, participants from 37 nations and five continents, representing research performing and research funding institutions, Ministries of Innovation, Research and Education, higher education associations and rectors’ conferences, and other umbrella organizations unanimously affirmed their commitment to accelerating the transition to open access through transformative agreements and, together, called upon publishers to engage with any individual institution or consortium who wishes take such action. Get in touch with the OA Forward to learn what steps you can take to initiate such a strategy.

Besides the immediate academic and societal benefits that come from making the latest peer-reviewed research available for scientists and citizens of the world to read and build upon, transformative agreements create the preconditions necessary for systemic change in scholarly communication. While revenues may still flow to the dominant publishers during this period of transition, by transparently articulating fees at the article level or at the service level, a number of advances are set in motion.

While subscription pricing has been largely sheltered from the forces of market competition, hidden by non-disclosure clauses and rising from historic print expenditures, transformative agreements introduce cost transparency and place value on service levels rather than access. In this way, the playing field of scholarly publishing is opened to cost comparison and market competition—economic forces that drive innovation.

By unlocking lump-sum fees for big deal packages, or even journal subscriptions, and shifting to an “article economy”, funds will be able to follow authors as they determine the publishing venues most appropriate for their work—a necessary step on the path to a diverse ecosystem that reflects the needs and preferences of each discipline.

Below are some of the fundamental guidelines of transformative agreements, as defined by the OA Forward community; a listing of the specific requirements that have been adopted by national consortia and other organizations can be found here.

Transformative agreements are meant to enable a swift and irreversible shift away from the subscription model on a global scale, affecting the financial and operational changes required for a fully open access publishing paradigm. While individual transformative agreements have the potential to convert 100% of a given institution or consortium’s output to open access publishing, it is the sum of many agreements together that will induce the transition at scale. Naturally, wherein public funds and collective effort have assisted the transformation of a publisher’s portfolio to open access, this should remain open access and not revert to paywall access under subscription models.

Sample agreement language: The current agreement is a mechanism for transition with the aim of shifting to full open access over time.

In order to respond to the needs of scholarship in the digital era, authors must retain full use and re-use rights of their works.

Sample agreement language: Eligible authors under the agreement retain copyright and the publisher licenses these articles under the Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

In cases where authors choose licenses that restrict commercial and/or derivative uses of the articles (e.g., CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND), ‘license to publish’ agreements should ensure that the authors retain all rights, with the publisher being granted ‘limited’ or ‘non-exclusive’ use to the article contents.

It is in the public interest, not only that publicly funded research has the widest possible reach but that the costs and details of the transition to open access and its progress be openly available, so the sector can benchmark and better understand where investment or divestment is required and improve processes.

Sample agreement language: Under the current agreement details of all costs, pricing models and terms may be made publicly available online.

The spending level involved in the transition phase characterized by transformative agreements should be on the same level of current subscription spending, reining in the expenditures for open access publishing that have, previously, come on top of subscription fees (i.e., double-dipping). The community holds the expectation that cost-neutral transformative agreements should be available to all institutions globally, fully recognizing that institutions are diverse and need different options that reflect differing levels of publishing output, and that economic adjustments in the pricing of publishing services will follow as transparent costs enable market pressure to contain costs and as new forms of dissemination evolve.

Please refer to the section on open access workflows here.