Report on offset agreements: evaluating current Jisc Collections deals: Year 1 – evaluating 2015 deals

"Offset agreements for academic journals are designed to reduce the overall cost to academic libraries of supporting scholarly publishing. In these agreements, journal subscription costs and open access publication costs are offset against each other. There are different approaches to achieving this. Some offset agreements reduce the cost of article processing charges (APCs) – the fees sometimes paid to publishers to make research open access – and some reduce the amount an institution pays for a subscription in proportion to the amount it pays for APCs. Offsetting is intended as a transitional mechanism to support progress towards a fully open access scholarly publication system. This report is a comparative study of the different offset agreements that Jisc Collections has negotiated to date on behalf of UK academic libraries. It relies on financial data provided by higher education institutions (HEIs) themselves about the amounts they have paid for subscriptions and APCs. The most recent full year for which financial data was available at the time of publication was 2015, so this report will focus on the five offsetting agreements in use for the duration of that year. These are from the publishers Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, the Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. All five agreements are pilots and therefore subject to revision in subsequent years.1 Each of the five offset agreements are analysed and compared based on the available data. The discussion section highlights key issues arising from the data, especially with regards to the total cost of publication (TCP).2 The full costs of the transition to open access include much more than just APCs, so additional administration costs are also considered. This report is the first of three annual reviews of offset agreements: the 2017 report will use financial data for 2016, and the 2018 report will use financial data for 2017...."