What do transformative agreements transform?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3145/thinkepi.2020.e14e04Keywords:
Academic libraries, Big deals, Joint subscriptions, Library consortia, Open Access, Scholarly communication, Scholarly journals, Transformative agreements.Abstract
The world of scholarly communication is undergoing major changes leading towards a new reality. Scholarly journals are in crisis due to three factors: pay walled access, excessive costs, and their management gets further away from Academia. The open access movement pushes forward to achieve universal exchange of information among researchers, but this aim requires sustainable economic models.Transformative agreements are one of these possible models. They use money traditionally devoted to subscriptions to open access publishing. This shift would have to be cost-neutral (i.e. not requiring additional resources) making more articles available in open access. In this text, we define transformative agreements and outline the debates, distortions and disruptions they have generated.Since the formulation of Plan S, some countries are using transformative agreements to accelerate the transition towards open access, but these agreements have also opened interesting discussions. Do they harm pure open access publishers and journals? Are they transitional or have they come to stay? Will they unbalance frail consortial agreements for cost distribution? Will they cause a free rider problem with some institutions stop contributing? Will costs remain neutral and prices will stop increasing?
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