"Transformative" deals with publishers: a controversial step forward in the implementation of Open Access

Abstract

Multiple proposals are piling up these days at Universities in Britain and other countries for so-called "˜transformative´ agreements negotiated between commercial scientific publishers and national and regional university library consortia. These proposals, aligned to a certain extent with the Plan Sguidelines, aim to expand the application of immediate or Gold Open Access to the highest possible number of institutional publications with a given publisher. Within an already familiar context of quick changes in the policies related to Open Access implementation (Plan S was launched in Sep 2018 and its reviewed implementation guidance following a public consultation was only made public at the end of May 2019), this text examines the controversial implications of these transformative agreements, both with regard to their impact on the general scholarly communications landscape and with regard to the institutional workflows aimed to secure the maximum possible open availability of the institutional research outputs. The text addresses these issues from the specific perspective of a Scottish University served by two library consortia, the Jisc Collections in the UK and Shedl in Scotland, and with a very successful institutional implementation of the national-level (Green) Open Access policy associated to the UK research assessment exercise or REF (Research Excellence Framework). As part of the framework governing the implementation of Open Access at the University of Strathclyde, it´s also worth mentioning the support for the coverage of Open Access publishing fees received from several UK funding agencies since 2015. This ability to pay for APCs for institutional publications from the library allows the university to have accurate data for the expenditure in this area, and confers these transformative deals a certain continuity within a strategy aimed to achieve full Open Access.