Joint Understanding of Offsetting – ESAC Initiative

"Objectives of offsetting agreements

• Offset deals are pilot models. They cannot be regarded as properly established agreement types yet. They are rather transitional models in order to pave the ways to a fully open access business model. Since an actual offset of costs is not a consistent component of the current agreements and since there are also further non-APC-based models to conceive, the term ‘transitional model’ would be preferred.
• Offset deals (or transitional models) should therefore lead to a proper open access model. This includes to fully omitting subscription costs or other access based costs components. With regard to publishing fee based business models, they must lead to a “pay as you publish” agreement between institutions and publishers.
• Offset agreements must lead to differentiated pricing models that replace standard prices for publishing fees for all journals of a publisher. This requires working on reasonable criteria such as citations, compliance, dissemination or publishing services. Price caps have also to be discussed.
• Offsetting implies the opportunity to overcome dysfunctionalities as known from the current subscription system and to improve the business for scholarly publishing in terms of transparency and efficiency rather than to perpetuate it. Offset deals should therefore take these objectives into account by including appropriate mechanisms...."