Transitional Agreements Aren’t Working: What Comes Next? - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Most important is the question of whether TAs deliver on their promise of their name to be transitional and transformative. Overall, the rate of journal “flipping” is low (with the exception of some smaller publishers). Most shocking, if not entirely unsurprising, to me was the following finding: based on the journal flipping rates observed between 2018 – 2022 it would take at least 70 years for the big five publishers to flip their TA titles to OA. (In recognition of the slowness of this transition, cOAlition S booted 1,589 journals from its transition program last year.)

And while these data and conclusions are from the UK, it’s worth noting that similar analyses elsewhere have come to the same conclusions. Plan S’s Annual Review 2023 is entirely aligned with Jisc’s findings: Gold is the primary route to OA, Hybrid is growing thanks to TAs, and Green is in decline. (It remains to be seen whether cOAlition S’s decision to cease funding TAs at the end of this year will impact these trends.) A report last year from the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions noted the risk of “getting stuck in a permanent transformation that favors large commercial publishers”. And a recent analysis based on agreements from the ESAC Registry also found that the primary shift was from closed to hybrid journals, with as yet little evidence that this would lead to “flipping the system”....

I have always been skeptical about TAs, but I think that the real culprit is not so much the TA itself but the underlying payment model: the APC...."