WSU Transformative Agreements: Open Access Publishing Support: Transformative Agreements

Transformative agreement refers to a term that describes agreements negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers in which former subscription expenditures are repurposed to support open-access publishing of the negotiating institutions’ authors, thus transforming the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing, gradually and definitively shifting from one based on toll access (subscription) to one in which publishers have remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services. (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges, ESAC).

WSU authors are eligible to publish Open Access with the publishers below:

Statements

South Africa

• NRF. 2015. Statement on Open Access to Research Publications from the National Research Foundation (NRF)-Funded Research, [January 2015]. Pretoria, South Africa: National Research Foundation.

Principles for transformative agreements typically include many components that are related to the transition from subscription-based reading to contractually-based publishing.

• Costs. Libraries seek transformative agreements to shift from paying subscriptions to paying for publishing to further the movement toward an open-access publishing ecosystem. Libraries may also pursue transformative agreements to attempt to exert control over rising payments for publishing, particularly under mandates for open-access publishing.
• Copyright. Transformative agreements tend to require that copyright be retained by the author and not transferred to the publisher. Though this may be accomplished by the publisher procuring a license to publish, agreements increasingly couple copyright retention with a requirement that the author apply a Creative Commons license to the published article and possibly to the author's manuscript version(s). CC BY is very commonly recommended or required.  
• Transparency. Principles for transformative agreements often insist that the terms of any such agreements be made publicly available. However, though full contracts are sometimes made public, even the most staunch advocates of open-access transformative agreements may only provide an overview of the key components..
• Transitional. Definitionally, transformative agreements are transitional in that they seek a pathway to shift away from payment to read and toward payment to publish. They are predicated on an end state in which subscription-based reading payments cease to exist. This end state may not be imminent, but the goal is a shift to open access and the concomitant paying for publishing rather than reading (Society for Scholarly Publishing).